TACOMA AND THE SEATTLE GENERAL STRIKE

Edwin T. Short, "The Seattle General Strike in Tacoma, After Many Years," The Tacoma Times.

Rumors and rumblings of a general strike on the Pacific Coast to force a settlement of the longshore troubles recall the interesting but futile effort of 15 years ago to tie the Northwest into an industrial and economical hard knot because of a row between shipyard employes and employers.

Tacoma had just a little taste of the general strike dose, but the movement here flivvered out in a few hours because of a split among Central Labor council delegates. But over in Seattle, where the movement started, things were pretty well tied up.

The strike lasted five days. Then the wheels began to move and some of the boys went back to work without having gained one advantage. Some of thein never did go back. All of them lost five days' pay and the organized labor movement in the Northwest was given a blow from which it never fully recovered!

One of the interesting recollections of the five-day tieup was the reaction of members of organized labor to general strike conditons. A strategy committee had agreed that a few bake shops,dairies and wholesale meat establishments would operate to prevent actual suffering but every other source of food supply was to be shut tight so that everybody would see and recognize the power of labor. Strikers were to be fed at a commissary. And that was the straw that broke the back of the general strike.

It was about this time that we were hearing a great deal about how the Bolsheviks were feeding hungry Russians through the commissary system. The theory sounded fine, and early in the morning of the first day of the general strike several thousand men and women were milling around the Labor Temple eager to sample a comissary breakfast. The only hitch in the program was that the breakfast bell didn't ring. Getting things in shipshape to feed a few thousand people right off the bat wasn't as simple as it seemed.

In the middle of the morning the first bakery trucks backed up to the Labor Temple. Volunteers carried the bread in armfuls
like stovewood and piled it on the floor of the "dining hall." About noon kettles of stew arrived from a restaurant kitchen operated under commissary direction. Two hours later the doors were opened and the crowd rushed in. Bowls of cold stew and chunks of bread were spread on tables made of boards laid on saw benches. No spoons, knives or forks. Anybody hungry enough to eat cold stew could dunk it with a chunk of bread.

Maybe there wasn't a lot of growling! Metal trades workers who had been drawing $12 a day in the shipyards and living on the fat of the land wanted to know "wotinell" they thought they were anyway--hogs!

After the first day's failure the order went out that the commissary would feed only those who did not have homes. Heads of families were told that they would have to take care of themselves and eat at home. The commissary, however, was not equal even to that.

Those who had been dreaming of a great commonwealth controlled by industry began to fear that perhaps their confidence had been misplaced. If the workers couldn't handle a "simple" problem like feeding a few thousand persons, what would happen if they tried to operate great industrial plants?

Ole Hanson, mayor of Seattle, now a California real estate promoter, claimed credit for "breaking" the general strike. But it wasn't Ole. The sloppy commissary took the glamour out of the tieup. Sober reflection by thousands of workers who had been forced into the walkout against their better judgment and the increasing resentment of victims who had no part in the original quarrel, finished it.

The effect of the general strike on the innocent bystanders was one of the influences which hurt organized labor in the Northwest. Thousands pf Seattle residents who had championed the cause of organt4ed labor lost interest in the movement entirely when they were compelled to do without street cars, foodshops, and the other necessities and conveniences of which they had been deprived because of a quarrel in which they were not involved.

This isn't an argument for or against the use of a general strike to enforce the demands of labor. It is just a review of one general strike which flivvered and injured the prestige of organized labor in the Northwest. There is no evidence to warrant the belief that another general strike would be any more helpful than was the one 15 years ago.

On the contrary, sympathetic observance of the labor movement since the days of the Knights of Labor has created the belief that the general strike is the most ineffective weapon labor can use to obtain its rights.

The general strike affects too many innocent bystanders, and when the innocent bystander is hurt he wants to strike back at the immediate source of his injury!
Edwin T. Short, "The Seattle general strike in Tacoma, After Many Years. The Tacoma Times.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++SEATTLE GENERAL STRIKE.

Robert L. Friedheim, "The Seattle General Strike of 1919," Pacific Northwest Quarterly. LII (July, 1961) p. 81-98.

At ten o;clock in the morning, February 6, 1919, the city of Seattle was ominously quiet.

Sixty thousand organized workingmen had failed report to their jobs. Buses and trolleys returned in their barns. No smoke poured from the chimneys of factories, workshops, and foundries in the ordinarily bustling industrial portions of the city and its waterfront.

On the virtually deserted downtown streets, only a few people moved quietly past closed stores and shops. The store shelves had long since been emptied of food and fuel-and rifles and pistols.

On that Thursday morning even the public schools of the Northwest's Queen City were closed. Seattle lay paralyzed. The first major general strike in American history had begun.

The whole country anxiously awaited news of the events unfolding in Seattle. The reports were carried by the wire services and in follow-up magazine articles branded the general strike a revolution. These reports helped to frighten the American middle class into believing that revolution stalked the land, and thus in part helped convince them of the necessity of the infamous Palmer raids of 1919 and 1920.

The Seattle General Strike also produced a colorful new American hero-the city's mayor Ole Hansen who, according to his own modest account of events in February, 1919, suppressed a revolution. The personal publicity garnered by Hanson because of the strike gave him delusions of grandeur; he proclaimed himself a candidate for
Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States.
The Seattle General Strike has at various times been referred to as a Bolshevik type of revolution, planned and carried out by Soviet agents; a one-man revolution engineered by a local radical,
Leon Green, business agent of an electrical workers' local union; an uprising by the Industrial Workers of the World attempted under cover of a strike of the unions in the American Federation of Labor;4 an insurrection led by James A. Duncan, secretary of the Seattle Central Labor Council, thumbing its nose at Samuel Gompers and the conservative leaders of the A.F. of L.,International craft unions; and, as labor itself alleged, merely a demonstration of sympathy by Seattle labor with their striking fellow workers in the shipyards."

While all of these views contribute something toward understanding the causes and meaning of the strike, none contains more than partial and distorted truth.

The effects of the Seattle General Strike on the country mark it as an event of major importance. Because none of the previous investigations of the strike is adequate, a fresh look may be welcome.

The causes of the general strike were numerous and complex. For purposes of analysis, they can be discussed in three general categories: (1) general instability during this era throughout major portions of the world, felt both locally and nationally; (2) the organization, ideology, and mood of Seattle labor; and (3) the immediate cause-the Seattle shipyard strike, directed against yard owners and the Emergency Fleet Corporation, a wartime subsidiary of the United States government.

In February, 1919, the fighting of World War 1, the greatest war yet experienced, had ceased less than three months earlier. The losing powers were militarily defeated and socially and politi- cally unstable. Most of the victors had extended themselves to the limit in blood and treasure to achieve their victory, and many of their peoples were disillusioned and tired.

Revolution and revolt occurred in the lands of both victor and vanquished. In this unstable postwar world, men and govemments had to face the problem of reconverting their manpower, resources, industries, and farms to meet the needs of a goods starved world.

Even more difficult than material conversion was the task of reorienting men's minds. Both soldiers and civilians were said to have been brutalized by their participation in the war, and many social critics wondered whether traditional social and political patterns could ever be restored. Attitudes of hatred, fear, anger, and frustration, often officially directed against internal dissenters and external enemies, were rife.

This was an era of extraordinary and upsetting events. The newspapers of the day carried inflammatory front-page stories on the Kapp Putsch in Berlin, the Hungarian revolution led by Bela Kun, a general strike in Buenos Aires, the Khaki election in Great Britain, the Spartakist uprisings in Germany and the dramatic deaths of its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and the treaty-making at Versailles by the leaders of the victorious nations-Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando.

These events, however, were overshadowed by an occurrence of even more lasting importancethe Bolshevik Revolution. The March, 1917, revolution, which overthrew the Russian Czar, was acclaimed by most "democratic" peoples of the world. Not so the Bolshevik Revolution of October, 1918.

The October Revolution, and the civil war and Allied intervention that followed, split "democratic" opinion into two antagonistic camps-the left, defending the revolution as the beginning of paradise on earth; the right, attacking it as hell on earth. The conflicting attitudes on what should be done about Russia strongly affected the political struggles of these groups within their own countries.

The United States, while less affected than Europe by the turmoil of the era, was not entirely exempt from the mood of unres were a number of Negro lynchings in the South.

The eighteenth or prohibition ammendment which soon became associated with with lawlessness, was adopted two months after the Armistice. Even nature seemed to conspire against stability: an influenza epidemic which had littered the land with dead was still taking numerous victims.

Wartime hatreds against dissenters, aliens, slackers, "Huns," saboteurs, and other of radicals had not abated. The press kept the "Hang the Kaiser" movement alive. Repression and prosecution of dissenters continued. The Industrial Workers of the World, whose secret of opposition to America's participation in the "Capitalist War," were particularly hard hit.

Jails throughout the West held many "class-war victims," as the Wobblies called them. Just before the general strike in Seattle, forty-six I.W.W.'s were put on trial in Sacramento for obstructing the war effort. Sentiment for conviction ran high both in the press and in respectable society.

Seattle had many of its own examples of intolerance to dissent. Louise Olivereau, a typist for an I.W.W. local, received a ten-year prison. term for distributing anti-war leaflets and thus: violating the Espionage Act. Although her actions were disavowed by the I.W.W., the prosecution alleged that her efforts were sponsored by that organization and paid for with German gold. The jury needed only thirty minutes to reach its verdict.

Two local Socialists, Hulet Wells, former president of the Seattle Central Labor Council, and Sam Sadler, agitated against the passage by Congress of the Conscription Law. Although they desisted after it became law, nevertheless they were brought to trial. The result was a hung jury. The two were retried, convicted, and given a two-year prison sentence for "conspiring to prevent the execution of the joint resolution of Congress declaring war."

lt was later alleged that Wells was tortured while serving his sentence at McNeil Island penitentiary."

Repression of "undesirable elements" was handled not only by agents of the United States govunent, but also by officially sanctioned private patriotic groups. The American Protective League, through its active arm, the Minutemen, whose function was to assist in "suppression of anarchy, sedition, and sabotage," quickly infiltrated labor and radical organizations. It became extremely busy in enforcing its brand of patriotism.

The local Middle Class was to some extent usually suspicious of the ideological position of Seattle labor. Strange new organizations were being formed in their community. A Workers, Soldiers, and Sailors Council, sponsored by the Seattle Metal Trades Council, was a prime ex.nple. It appeared to be modeled after the olshevik soviet. Some of its sponsors hoped it would serve the same revolutionary function as its archetype," but its principal purpose was to help in the adjustment of returning veterans to civilian life.

Labor hoped by this effort to prevent capital from organizing the veterans as a force with which to break strikes and destroy the closed shop. But labor's organization was rapadly infiltrated by Minutemen."

Another event causing suspicion amonlr local conservative groups was the heavy involvement of the Seattle labor movement in sponsoring the Mooney Conference in Chicago. This conference was called to protest the imprisonment of Thomas Mooney, a San Francisco labor leader who had been convicted for the bombing of a Preparedness Day parade in 1916. Although his death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, labor vehemently insisted upon his innocence and demanded complete exoneration.
The Seattle movement was a hotbed of Mooney support. In addition to being one of the three original sponsors of the conference, local labor sent an unusually large delegation, including most of its important leaders. These men helped spearhead the decision of the conference to ask labor organizations throughout the country to call a general strike if Mooney was not given a new trial by July 4, 1919.

Antagonism between left and right in Seattle was sharpened by that momentous event abroad -the Bolshevik Revolution. The conservatives of the community, and especially the representatives of business, took more than ordinary measures to discredit the new regime in Russia. The Daily Bulletin, a business newspaper, was particularly incensed, for example, over the "infamous decree issued by the Bolsheviks at Saratow which called for the socialization of women, the vilest document ever penned."

Labor and the left generally were equally vehement, if not as colorful, in defense of the Bolshevik experiment. Their enthusiasm led to two riots on Seattle streets. The first stemmed from an open-air meeting sponsored by several labor organizations to protest American intervention in Siberia.

The meeting was broken up by the police, military police, and Minutemen, who arrested thirteen men, most of whom were said to be enemy aliens. All labor was bitterly Incensed over the actions of the authorities. The second riot occurred at a meeting held to protest police handling of the first. As could be exsected in a "free-speech fight," the I.W.W. played a prominent part.

Five hundred participants listened to radical speeches and sang irreverent I-W-W. songs, while 5,000 spectators looked on. When the 500 militants began to form up to march on the city jail, mounted police broke up the formation . Such was the mood of Seattle on the eve of the general strike.

The Seattle Labor Movement while a component part of the A.F. of L., was conspicuous for its differences with Samuel Gompers' leadership on questions of ideology and organization. Seattle labor felt that the parent body was not sufficiently militant in leading American laboring men to their rightful position in society, although their own concept of what that position should be was hazy.

Seattle workers were bound by a feeling of solidarity and class consciousness. The jargon of class conflict was in constant use. Many shades of leftist opinion flourished and were tolerated and protected. Although the I.W.W. was a rival organization, the Wobblies were considered fellow workers, and, when they got into trouble, they were often defended by the Seattle A.F. of L. group.
It is clear, however, that beyond being generally attracted to the left, the workingmen of Seattle were not doctrinaire; in fact, they were too eclectic. Labor circles were in a constant ferment over leftist ideas, many of which conflicted with each other. Seattle workers were unsophisticated in their understanding of im- ported leftist ideologies.

For example, although they were enthusiastic supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution, their acquaintance with Marxist and Leninist thought was only in attenuated form. A pamphlet, published by the Rand School of Social Science in New York,. with detailed notes by Alexander Trachtenberg, explaining such esoteric terms as Bolshevik, Menshevik, the dialectic, and democratic centralism, was republished locally. But the editor omitted the notes and added simple paragraph headings because she felt the terms explained by Trachtenberg were too complex for local readers.

The most notable characteristic of Seattle labor's radicalism was the degree to which it was tinged with pragmatism. The workinginen were willing to use any device that promised to show up "the interests"; results were the only criterion. The A.F. of L. men of Seattle used politics, union and cooperative ownership of industry, and direct economic action as tactics. This sharply differentiated them from the local I.W.W., which would not consider using the "capitalist" political system to promote the workingmen's cause.

The cooperative movement was considered an important weapon by the Seattle A.F. of L. leaders. Labor either held shares in or attempted to promote a food market, a laundry, a stevedoring firm, a union theater, and a motionpicture company.

Seattle labor was distinctly regional in outlook. The East was identified with the capitalist enemy, as were the conservative elements in the A.F. of L. which kept Samuel Gompers, also an eneniv, in power. All factions of local A.F. of L. labor were proud of their strong organization. They recognized it as having a distinct identity.

No matter where they stood, from left to right on the political spectrum, Seattle workingmen believed that they had more in common with each other than with any other group, either local or national, outside the organization. For example, F. A. Rust, well known locally as a labor con servative and custodian of the Labor Temple, maintained that the only difference between Seattle labor conservatives and radicals was a difference in temperament-dictating the choice of different means to achieve a similar end.

Seattle was also a stronghold for industrial unionism. Few members could state at a meeting of a local labor group that they were completely happy with the craft structure of the A.F. of L. Most of them were convinced that, with the rise of modem industry employing many different crafts, separate labor organizations along craft lines were inadequate. Only a minority, however, were willing to organize industrially if they had to disaffiliate with A.F. of L. to do it.

Many of them wanted bo a new form of organization and a secure position within the A.F. of L. So instead of directly forming the "One Big Union" in each industry they found substitutes that would be adequate until they could "educate" the East to the necessity of a new form of organization.

One policy was close control of labor locals in the area the Seattle Central Labor Council. Another tight supervision of allied craft unions by trade councils such as the Metal Trades Council the Building Trades Council. A third was attempt to negotiate contracts for various working in the same industry so that such contracts would expire simultaneously, thus preventing economic hardship for a nonstriking union man that refused to cross the picket lines of a striking union.

Although Seattle labor worked together with remarkable unity, there were three distinct wings of labor opinion that they themselves recognized: they called them "conservatives," "radicals," and "progressives."

The conservatives, while more liberal in outlook than labor conservatives elsewhere, were definitely to the right of the other groups. They were, as the Wobblies put it, "pie card artists"; that is, they would rather organize and agitate for the full dinner pail than for the larger questions of economic and social justice. While the I.W.W. judgment was extreme, it contained a germ of truth. In the Seattle movement, the conservatives were less vocal on the floor of union meetings than were other groups, but they were well represented in official positions in local unions.

The radicals, to be understood, must be divided into two factions. Although they were frequently allied on specific issues, there were significant differences between the free-wheeling A.F. of L. radicals with no outside organizational ties and those I.W.W. men, known as borers, who also held A.F. of L. cards.

The non-I.W.W. radicals, such as Frank Turco of the Metal Trades Council, Phil Pearl of the Barbers, and Percy May of the Longshoremen, were in the forefront of every attempt to impose radical ideas on the Seattle A.F. of L. organization.
Their opinions were solicited respectfully by members of organized labor. But when a pet scheme of a Pearl or a Turco seemed to be leading Seattle labor into difficulty with the A.F. of L.
international unions or with the public men would back down. They long to push the organization to the internal split, nor were they willing to foment a revolution against public authority.

Another identifying characteristic of these radicals was their refusal to conduct themselves as an organized faction. They were a collection of individuals who, although they held similar views, frequently came down on different sides in a controversial issue.

This was not true of I.W.W. borers. Their purpose within A.F. of L. was to destroy it and to promote vague but emotional I.W.W. ideology of action and revolution. They would seldom fundamentally from their I.W.W. brethren on the outside, nor would they desist from agitating, even though it might seem to be hurting the Seattle labor organization.

Boring reached significant proportions in the shipyard unions. Some of the labor spies claimed that Wobblies were numerous in Boilermakers Local 104 and the Hope Lodge of Machinists. They were also said to be relatively strong in the Longshoremen's local. While numerous I.W.W.'s were in A.F. of L. locals, too frequently the spies lumped independent radicals with borers.

The I.W.W. borers alone, or in combination with the independent radicals, did not control these orpnnations, nor did they manipulate the general strike from behind the scenes. Although they tried, the borers and independent radicals could not unseat the conservative and progressive officials who controlled the Boilermakers' and Machinists' unions.

Concentrated as they were in the shipyard locals already on strike, borers could not directly control the many conservative craft unions which voted to hold a general strike. The real importance of the I.W.W. two-card men was not their control of the general strike, but their suggesting it as a tactic initially. Propaganda and agitation, not organization manipulation, were the forte of the I.W.W.

The borers merely reinforced the effect of the open I.W.W. organization. In general, Wobbly propaganda can be credited with familiarizing the A.F. of L. men of Seattle with the concepts of industrial unionism and the general strike.

The progressives were the controlling element in Seattle labor. Led by James A. Duncan, secretary of the Central Labor Council, Harry Ault, editor of the Union Recard, and a host of secondary leaders, the progressives in both method and belief stood midway between the
conservatives and the radicals. Because they were trusted by both sides, they were effective in molding Seattle labor into a united organization. They were far enough to the left to bring the radicals into the fold and sufficiently moderate not to alienate the conservatives. They were tough, hardheaded, practical men. In the main, it was they who gave the Seattle labor movement its reputation for flexibility and pragmatism.

The progressives led Seattle labor by dominating the Central Labor Council. Their method was called Duncanism, after the recognized leader of Seattle labor, James A. Duncan. Through the Central Labor Council, Duncan and his supporters, rather than the officials of the international craft unions, firmly controlled the local Seattle unions. The Council had so much centralized power that many of the A.F. of L. international union officials complained bitterly that their Seattle locals gave primary loyalty to the Central Labor Council.

The habit of working together and the confidence that they could rely upon the assistance of other local unions in the area gave Seattle labor a sense of independence. Duncanism was a substitute for industrial unionism. Craft exclusiveness, which resulted in factional fights and jurisdictional disputes, was kept to a minimum.

The Central Labor Council and strong unions would lend money, organizers, and time to weak unions even in other trades. Seattle laboring men were co ncerned with keeping wages high and working conditions tolerable for all crafts and industries in order to present a united front to the local employers. As Duncan explains it, he 'had his progressives reject Gompers' craft unionism and strong international union control not merely to prevent local A.F. of L. factions from fighting each other, but also to prevent inroads of the I.W.W. into organized labor.

Because the I.W.W. was powerful in Seattle and because many members of the local A.F. of L. would have objected had the Central Labor Council directly attacked so-called fellow workers, Duncan believed the best defense against the I.W.W. was the creation of a rival A.F. of L. organization-internally united, active, and fairly militant-which could hold the loyalty of its members.", The need not to appear stodgy and conservative accounts in part for the frequency with which fire-breathing resolutions were approved by the Central Labor Council.

The Council in reality, however, was less militant. As the radicals later complained, strong resolutions could be passed, but support for them would not be forthcoming through the Council unless "Jimmy" Duncan approved.

The strength and unity of the A.F. of L. organization in Seattle were bolstered by the support of a labor-owned daily newspaper, the Seattle Union Record. Established in 1917, the Record gave labor a public voice and had a devoted following among Seattle workingmen. Harry Ault, the editor of the newspaper, cooperated with Duncan in promoting the unity of Seattle labor. The feature editor of the Record was Anna Louise Strong, a young lady of ad- vanced views and the daughter of a prominent local clergyman. Of her we shall hear more later.

The Seattle Shipbuilding Industry boomed during the First World War. Men poured in from the hinterlands-farms, fields, and woods to take jobs building the ships needed in the war effort. In Seattle and vicinity, approximately 35,000 men were employed by shipyards constructing both metal and wooden vessels and by allied industries. By tacit agreement the ship- building industry was operated on a closed-shop basis; the men were affiliated with locals under the jurisdiction of the Seattle Metal Trades Council.

The rapidity of growth of the Seattle labor population caused acute competition for limited facilities. The new working populace was not enamored of many conditions they found in Seattle-rent gouging, shortage of living space, and high prices. On the other hand, the older residents were not happy over the newcomerc potential power to change the character of their city. It was well known that many of the ship yard workers were radicals, that some were secret: I.W.W.'s who took out A.F. of L. cards to get: work, and that "all of them [were] impatient of tradition.

Their beliefs, however, did not inter their efficiency. In 1918 ninety-six ocean going vessels aggregating 535,200 dead-weight tons were constructed. Speed records were seventy-eight days were necessary to ready a metal, freighter for war service.

During the course of the war, shipyard disputes over wages, hours, or working conditions were not handled directly by unions and man.. agement. In August, 1917, the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board or Macy Board, named after its chairman, V. Everit Macy, was created by agreement among the United States Emergency Fleet Corporation, the Navy Department and the international presidents of the shipyardi unions, to handle such matters.

Because of war, the Seattle shipyard workers did not strike although they were extremely bitter over manner in which the Board handled the question. But when the fighting stopped, no longer felt constrained by their no-strike pledge.

Twice in 1917 the Macy Board authorized wage increases for West Coast shipyards in attempt to keep up with the rising cost of living The Seattle shipyard workers contended that the increases were both insufficient and unfair for three reasons.

(1) Increases granted in 1917 based on wages paid for nongovernmental tract work in Seattle during 1916, when some the unions were well organized and satisfied conditions while other unions were poorly organized and dissatisfied. Labor claimed that
although the 1917 Macy awards increased wages to an average 60 cents per hour, in some cases they actually decreased the wages weak unions. This disproportionate increase probably resulted from the fact that most of the weak unions had improved their wages over the, 1916 scale used by the Macy Board.

(2) The wage scales laid down by the Board were viewed as the minimum wage when labor agreed abide by Board decisions. They later hardened into maximum wages, as the Board sought use its wage-determining powers as a device to curb rival employers from luring skilled men with the promise of better wages. Labor resented ,the fact that the government was preventing it from getting the best terms possible.

(3) The Macy Board tried to standardize wages nationally. Since wages had traditionally been higher in the Northwest than in the East, the Board, in making its award, granted Northwest labor a smaller wage increase than it gave workers in eastem shipyards. Because prices in the Northwest also were higher, Seattle labor claimed that it had been discriminated against. It was even rumored that Charles Piez, director of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, deliberately rigged the wage,scale against Seattle labor on orders from eastern capitalists, who feared the competition of efficient and well-paid Seattle labor.

Piez was supposed to have been rewarded for his efforts with stock in the Hog Island shipyard in Philadelphia.

After the Armistice, Seattle labor hoped it could get a reexamination of the Macy Board decisions. The Seattle Metal Trades Council, which negotiated for all craft unions represented in the shipyards, sent its president, James A. Taylor, to Washington to appear in person before. the appeal board of the Emergency Fleet Corporation.

The appeal board deadlocked on the question of overruling the 'Macy award. Taylor, however, thought that he had received verbal permission to negotiate directly with the Seattle shipyard managements on the condition that any wage increases granted would not be reflected in the price of the ships for which the government had contracted. This permission was later withdrawn, although actually, contrary to Taylor's assumption, it had never been granted.

In preparation for negotiating with the shipyard management, the Metal Trades Council authorized a strike vote in November, 1918. A majority of the crafts concerned (as required by the A.F. of L. constitution for an industry-wide strike), as well as a majority of the total number of men involved, voted in favor of striking.

The results were kept secret for over a month in the hope that the employers' ignorance would prevent them from agreeing among themselves on a united policy toward labor's demands. Bert Swain, secretary of the Metal Trades Council, later admitted that this maneuver was a mistake. It lent credence to the supposedly managementinspired rumors that the men did not know the issues upon which they were voting.

On January 16, 1919, the Metal Trades Council began its negotiations with the yard rnanagements. Labor demanded $8.00 per day for mechanics, $7.00 for specialists, $6.00 for helpers, and $5.50 for manual laborers. The managements of yards that constructed metal vessels offered the Metal Trades negotiators a wage increase to 861/2 cents per hour for skilled workers, but would not consider any increase for the unskilled. The offer was rejected and the strike mandate put into effect, amid local press accolades for the skilled laborers, who generously would not abandon their less skilled brothers.

Before the Metal Trades unions could strike or management make a revised offer, the United States government-in the person of Charles Piez-intervened to upset the collective bargaining process. Piez sent a telegram to the employers' Metal Trades Association, which, because of an error by the messenger boy, was received instead by the workers' Metal Trades Council. The contents of the telegram infuriated labor Piez had threatened to cut off the employers' supply of steel if they acceded to labor's demands.

The Metal Trades Council immediately denied Piez's right to intervene. It stated that it was not bound by the Macy award because that award was illegal. The agreement to set up and abide by the decisions of the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board was entered into by the international craft presidents, the Metal Trades Council claimed, in contravention of the A.F. of L. constitution, which specified that agreements made by international unions did not bind locals without their consent.

Because of the war, the Council explained, the metal trades of Seattle had been willing to abide by the decisions of the Board, but after the Armistice a new situation was at hand, and they no longer felt bound. It has never been authoritatively determined what instigated Charles Piez to take a hand in the Seattle shipyard dispute. Was it the eastern capitalists, as labor alleged? Or did Piez do so on his own misunderstanding of the nature of the struggle 3,000 miles away? There is also a third possibility. It was well known that the open-shop movement had begun to wax strong in the Northwest.211 QUite possibly the shipyard owners requested Piez's assistance in order to have an excuse for not negotiating.

This last possibility was uppermost in the minds of labor. Fear that management had embarked on the first round of an open-shop struggle, backed by the power and authority of the United States government, was the main reason that even conservatives among Seattle labor were willing to go so far as to stage a general strike.

Employer obstinacy, exacerbated by Piez's telegram, encouraged labor to believe that its demands would be met only through its power to halt production. On January 21 the shipyards closed down completely. Some 28,000 men'filed silently out of the gates. There was no violence. Because emotions ran high over labor's fear of the forces it believed it faced, the Metal Trades Council went to great lengths to control the strikers. It banned any gatherings, demonstrations, or parades by its members.

The conservative press of Seattle also took the strike calmly, even though it realized that the Emergency Fleet Corporation would be forced by its position on the strike to cancel local contracts. The calm that greeted the strike unnerved labor, which expected more concern and immediate negotiation. Instead, the employers refused to negotiate, and some of them left town to go on vacation.31, Behind the scenes, however, the employers were counterattacking.

According to labor representatives, management began to spread rumors that the strike was not favored by the rank and file. Foremen circulated petitions asking for a re-vote on the strike referendum. The allegation that the Metal Trades Council had secretly rejected a compromise wage proposal offered by management was flatly denied by A. E. Miller of the Metal Trades Council. Labor was also harassed by a police raid on the Cooperative Food Products Association, which had extended the strikers credit after the Seattle Retail Grocers Association had refused them.

When the police raided the Coop on the pretext of looking for illegal liquor, labor saw this as an obvious attempt to cripple the st power of the strikers
On January 25 the situation was still in mate; management refused to negotiate, labor refused to return to work. Henry local representative of the United States Department and Immigration Bureau, ofl mediate, but his efforts came to nought. however, realized that it had to scotch mors of nonsupport from the rank and fil( erm akers Local 104, the largest union shipyards, held a meeting which was atter 6,000 of its members. With three rousing according to the Union Record, they vote continue the strike.

Labor needed great "solidarity" to hold against the opposing forces. Charles Piez entered the fray, indicating the implacable hostility of the United States government to any compromise over the terms of the Macy award. He bombarded the shipyard owners with telegrams ordering them to stand fast. He continued to show the unalterable opposition of the Emergency Fleet Corporation to the settlement of the shipyard strike on any but its own terms.

Later, in a series of paid advertisements in Puget Sound newspapers, Piez urged the workers to retum to Tneir jobs, but he did not offer them any conc@ ns in exchange. Management complied with nis order to stand fast, but labor persisted in defying his plea to return to work. The result was the use of a weapon virtually unknown in American labor history-the general strike.

A proposal to call a general strike to enforce labor's demands was first made by A. E. Miller at the regular meeting of the Central Labor Council on January 22, 1919. A resolution requesting that the local unions hold referendums on striking in sympathy with the shipyard workers was approved, with only one dissenting vote, . a wild, tumultuous meeting that could not be controlled by the presiding officers. It was made so by the Wobblies, who packed the public galleries and enthusiastically applauded every radicai speech, and by the absence of most of the important leaders of the labor movement, who in Chicago for the Mooney Conference.

The following evening, a mysterious show of support for a general strike began to form. At their regular Thursday night meetings, local unions voted to strike. The unanimity sentiment and the rapidity of assent was astonishing.

In the face of all expectations to contrary, this sentiment continued to grow at this early stage, however, the conservative local press could not conceive of labor resorting the use of a general strike. The Seattle Times editorially:

A general strike directed at WHAT? The Government of the United States? Bosh!

Not 15% of Seattle laborites would consider such a proposition

They were wrong--more and more locals quickly indicated approval of a general strike.

On the strength of the strike sentiment, a initial meeting of union executives was held Frebray 27; the purpose was to canvass their unions on the advisability and practicability calling a general strike. These officials were convened because they were not ordinarily deletes to the Central Labor Council, where the initial decision to put the general strike to a rank-and-file vote was made.

The union execuives aligned themselves into three groups: (1) hose who wanted a general strike immediately; (2) those who were willing to hold a general trike only after an evident open-shop move by employers; and (3) those who, because of their belief in the inviolability of contract, were unwilling to hold a general strike under present conditions. Those who expressed outright anti:general-strike opinions were in the minority.

But whether or not they approved the strike, the executives had no direct power to halt the referendum. While each could attempt to exercise his personal influence over his local's vote, the executives as a group could merely set in motion machinery to handle a general strike if a majority of locals voted in favor of holding one.

Thus they agreed that if by Sunday, February 2, a majority of the unions which had held referendums voted for a general strike, a mass meeting of unions favoring the strike should be convened to decide finally on holding a strike of all Seattle labor.

Opponents of labor unwittingly helped assure labor's approval of a general strike. Edwin Selvin, owner and publisher of the Business Chronicle, a weekly newspaper, and violent opponent of organized labor, began inserting a series of full-page paid advertisements in the three nonlabor-owned Seattle daily newspapers.

In the first of these, Selvin proposed that all labor "agitators" be replaced on the job by returning veterans. He advocated that employers tum Seattle, "the most labor tyrannized city in America," into a bastion of the open shop. Labor was convinced that the expected all-out effort to destroy organized unionism in Seattle had begun.

Night after night, as locals held their meetings, votes for a general strike continued to roll in. Old and conservative craft unions such as the Cooks, House Painters, and Carpenters voted overwhelmingly for the strike. When a majority of the 1,700-man Teamsters and Auto Truck Drivers Local 174 voted "yes," it was a virtual certainty that a general strike would be held.

On January 28, at a meeting of the Central Labor Council, twenty-three locals reported that their members were willing to strike en masse. While the debate on the floor was at times acri- monious, it was handled better than in the previous Council meeting, because the leaders of the labor movement, having returned from the Mooney Conference, were once again attempting to resume control.40 But beyond restoring decorum, they were only partially successful.

The essential question of whether to hold the strike was out of their hands-the matter had gone too far. The radicals, who approved of the strike, could merely attempt to lead what had begun without them. The conservatives opposed a general strike under any circumstances, but their influence corresponded closely to their limited numbers.

While the progressives had neither ethical nor ideological compunctions about calling a general strike, most of them feared the consequences of the unrestricted use of so unusual a weapon. Many of them believed that some type of nonviolent but dramatic demonstration was necessary to counter the growing anti-labor agitation of local capital.

They did not fear a general strike if they, the progressives, Planned and controlled it, but a strike or demonstration led by any other group, they felt, would get out of hand.

The progressives or Duncanites, the cement holding the union movement together, were presented with a dilemma. For the first time they lost control of the movement; the rank and file seemed to have gone over to the radicals.

It was beyond the power of the progressives to stop the agitation for the general strike; and without risking loss of respect among the majority of laboring men, they could not openly oppose it. On the other hand, their lack of enthusiasm for the general strike prevented them from making a strong bid to regain their leadership of the labor movement in this moment of crisis.

Instead, they merely attempted to act as informal advisers to the elected strike leaders to prevent them from doing anything rash.

This split vastly complicated the problem of setting clear and attainable goals for the strike. The conservatives totally opposed the strike and were of no assistance in formulating its goals. The ends sought by the progressives were rather negative-to show sympathy with the shipyard workers without allowing the strike to become uncontrollable and, therefore, a danger to the existence of the labor movement itself.
The expectations of the radicals were grandiose. For all their a itational propaganda about general strikes, the radicals did not understand their own tactic.

The revolutionaries among them hoped would be the beginning of the revolution in America, but for turning strike into revolution they had neither program, strategy, nor men in the key leadership positions.

After the workingmen laid down their tools, these leaders hoped that revolutionary spontaneity would finish the job. Those radicals who had no love for the capitalist system, but who were not willing to shed blood to destroy it, wanted to use the new weapon to strike blindly at all enemies of labor. They wanted the general strike to be directed against the corruption of capitalism, the perfidy of the government, the greediness of the ship. yard owners, and the machinations of employers who were trying to establish the open shop in Seattle.

They also wanted to reward their friends. ln addition to assisting the shipyard workers in their strike, they wanted to interpose the grievances of non-shipyard unions into a general strike settlement.

This move was spearheaded in a Central Labor Council meeting by the Longshoremen and the Barbers It was heatedly opposed by the Metal Trades Council representatives, who, although reputed to be radical, feared that the focus of the impending general strike would be shifted from the shipyard strike to matters irrelevant to them. The progressives, led by Duncan, trying to prevent further complication of an already confusing situation, gave them support and helped line up a sufficient number uncommitted unions to defeat the resolution.

This was only the first in a series of failures to define labor's terms for the settlement of the general strike. Labor's inability to state why and for what it was striking was the major reason for the strike's subsequent collapse

The crisis had been reached. The local press finally recognized that agitation for a general strike would not evaporate and that Seattle might soon face a situation experienced by no other major city in the United States. New mediation schemes were hastily proposed to avert the strike.

They were spoiled, however, when Henry White, the first mediator, was quoted by the Seattle Times as saying that the shipyard strike vote was not honest and that the gencral-strike vote probably was not either. The labor-owned Union Record replied with a violent attack on White's integrity. Although the following day White claimed that he had been incorrectly quoted, his usefulness was at an end. After this embarrassing incident, labor would put no credence in the claims of other would-be mediators.

The uncommitted were becoming frightened and the committed more obdurate. Edwin Selvin inserted a new paid advertisement in the major Seattle dailies which further inflamed local opinion. The newspapers were convinced that a zeneral strike would bring disaster to the community. The Seattle Times claimed that the city would be destitute in forty-eight hours, with babies and hospitals having to do without milk and bakeries without flour. Outright starvation was predicted for Alaska.

To prevent the feared consequences of a complete work stoppage, a new, hastily formed conciliation organization-the Industrial Relations Committee-began to negotiate with labor and with shipyard managements to settle the one concrete cause of the general strike-labor's demands in the shipyards. Spokesmen for this group were the Rev. Mark A. Matthews, Seattle's best-known clergyman, and James W. Spangler, president of the Seattle National Bank.

The conciliatory efforts of the Industrial Relations Committee, however, were to no avail. So many local unions had approved a strike vote that there was no question that the mass meetL ing sought by union executives for February 2 would be held. The 300 delegates began their discussions early in the morning and did not
finish until late that night.

During the morning, credentials were accepted and a date set for the strike-February 6 at ten o'clock in the morning. The afternoon and evening sessions were concerned with setting up machinery for running the strike.

The group constituted itself the General Strike Committee and took from the Central Labor Council complete responsibility for the strike. Because of its unwieldy size, the General Strike Committee could not handle directly all the dayto-day detail work. Instead, it created an Executive Committee of fifteen members responsible to it, which would act in its behalf. None of the fifteen was a local union official; only two were known as radicals.

This Executive Committee, through its subcommittees, was primarily concerned with one of the most controversial aspects of the strike: the question of which individuals, trades, and institutions would be exempt from the effects of the strike.

The members of the Executive Committee realized the difficulty of their assigned task. Even before the meeting of the large General Strike Committee had been adjourned, the Executive Committee began its deliberations. Before the general strike was over, its subcommittees had handled hundreds of requests for keeping es- sential facilities operating: it had set up cafeterias to feed those who could not eat at home; it got fuel and laundry to hospitals, mail delivered, government cargo unloaded, milk stations set up in residential districts; it secured emergency transportation and fire protection. In addition, it established a law-and-order subcommittee chaired by F. A. Rust.

Rust advertised in the Union Record for volunteers among the war veterans in the labor movement to join the Labor War Veterans Guard. This organization did an admirable job in preventing laboring men from getting out of hand. They broke up crowds; they urged the workingmen to keep their tempers and continually admonished them to keep the peace so that there would be no excuse to use the army to repress the strike with force.

The Executive Committee meeting of February 4 was of major significance to the history of the strike. During the meeting James A. Duncan, Harry Ault, and Robert Heskcth, later a member of the City Council, tried to urge the committee to adopt a definite time limit for the strike. They did not view the strike as the beginning of the revolution in America, but they realized that others might see it as such if there were no time limit.

They did not care how long the strike lasted-twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight,seventy-two hours, or a week-so long as the s
general public knew that thcre was a predetermined end.

According to Duncan, the three did well in presenting their case before the committee during the afternoon. However, they committed the tactical error of not asking for a vote before the supper recess. This break allowed the radical opponents of the measure to rally their forces. When the committee reconvened, Duncan, Ault, and Hesketh lost support of two key groups which had favored their position during the afternoon session-the Longshoremen and the Metal Trades Council representatives .

The progressives tried to regain their position by further persuasion, but when the vote was taken late at night, the measure was defeated by a narrow margin.

As the date approached for all union men to walk off their jobs, wide apprehension became evident in Seattle. The newspapers, which had previously been only mildly unhappy about the shipyard strike and did not believe a general strike possible, began to get panicky and flatly characterized the strike as an attempt at revo- lution.
An incident which exposed their latent fears was the distribution on downtown streets of a radical leaflet, "Russia Did It," by Wobbly Walker C. Smith, which advocated the confiscation of means of production .

Although the leaflet was disavowed by organized labor, it was widely believed to be part of the Strike Committee's official propaganda . The most extreme critic of labor's use of the general strike among the newspapers was the Seattle Star, once labor's friend. The Star's anti-labor stand was an important factor in turning the public against the strikers.

Opposition to the general strike more solid than newspaper rhetoric was forming rapidly.

The Industrial Relations Committee, after its failure at conciliation, now became the Citizens Committee. It switched from conciliating labor to opposing it, and soon became the most effec- tive force in the community pressuring labor to end the strike. Its representatives, Matthews and Spangler, now had the backing of thirty-six powerful civic, fraternal, and professional organiza- tions, whose members were among the most influential men in the city.

As if to justify all that newspapers, civic luminaries, and ordinary citizens feared about the strikers' motives, the Union Record on February 4 published what was to become the most famous document of the general strike-Anna Louise Strong's editorial "No One Knows
Where." This editorial was seized upon by opponents of the strike as proof that labor meant to confiscate private property and begin a revo-lution.

It said, in part:

We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever
made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead

NO ONE KNOWS WHERE . . . LABOR WILL FEED THE
PEOPLE . . . . LABOR WILL CARE FOR THE BABIES AND THE
SICK....... LABOR WILL PRESERVE ORDER. . . . A few hotheaded enthusiasts have complained that strikers only should be fed, and the general public left to endure severe discomfort. Aside from the inhumanitarian char. acter of such suggestions, let us get this straight-NOT THE WITHDRAWAL OF LABOR POWER, BUT THE POWER OF THE STRIKERS TO MANAGE WILL WIN THIS STRIKE....

The closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the WORKERS ORGANIZE to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order-this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of Power by the workers.

Labor will not only SHUT DOWN the industries, but Labor Will REOPEN, under the management of the appropriate trades, such activities as are needed to preserve public health and public peace. If the strike continues, Labor may feel led to avoid public suffering by reopening more and more activities. Under ITS OWN MANAGEMENT.

And that is why we say that we are starting on a road that leads-No ONE KNOWS WHERE!

This was an artful document. The mays, mights, and humanitarian sentiments expressed by Miss Strong were later important in saving hcr from a conviction for sedition. More important, however, was the fact that this editorial was the major statement in justification of the general strike. Although it ran a full page, Miss Strong never mentioned what the goals of the strikers were, what their terms were, or against whom the strike was directed-shipyard owners, oven-shop advocates, all Northwest employers, the United States government?

Did the editorial mean revolution? The real message of this con- fusing editorial was the total confusion among tne strikers over their aims-no one did know where!

But opponents of the strike believed that they knew where-straight to revolution, and they said so. ln its last edition before the strike, the Star ran an editorial (February 5) condemning the strike as a revolution. The nonlabor population of Seattle was now thoroughly aroused.

One other major event exacerbated community fears and made the charge of revolution wem tenable-the apparent determination of the strikers to shut down the municipally owned light plant. Leon Green, business agent of Electrical Workers Local 77, stated that he intended to pull all union workers out of the City Light plant; no exemptions were to be made to provide power for hospitals, food-storage facilities, or street lights. Green is reported to have said, "We shall place the city in such a position that the strike will last but a few short days."

Understandably, this caused a wave of public revulsion over the methods supposedly adopted by the strikers. Green and Mayor Ole Hanson had a running fight over this issue for several days. Actually, Green was bluffing, for he did not have the power to close down the light plant. His Local 77 was composed of outside linemen;' he had no jurisdiction over the organized laborers who worked inside the plant. But neither Mayor Hanson nor his superintendent of City Light, J. D. Ross, realized that Green was incapable of carrying out his threats.

Ross organized a volunteer crew of Western Electric Company engineers to take over the operation of the plant if necessary. Hanson then approached James A. Duncan in an attempt to persuade him to allow the lights to remain burning. Duncan, although he was working closely with the Executive Committee, told Hanson that the regular labor leadership was not in charge of the strike and that only the Executive Committee of Fifteen had the power to grant his request.

Hanson, known locally as an erratic down with a not overlarge amount of backbone, was in this instance under heavy pressure to insist that City Light supply most of its usual services' The electricians remained obdurate-an impasse had been reached.

Late during the night before the strike, the Executive Committee made a major effort to resolve the question. Both Hanson and the Electricians' representatives were invited to a hastily called committee meeting. The Electricians, under pressure by subcommittees of the Executive Committee and the Metal Trades Council to modify their position, were willing to allow the City Light plant to operate-on the condition that an exemption committee sit in the plant to decide on each exemption individually.

Hanson would not agree to this stipulation and walked out of the meeting, threatening to run the light plant with soldiers if he had to. After further debate, the Executive Committee realized that it would have to override the objections of the Electricians. A representative of the committee telephoned Hanson when he returned to City Hall to inform him that, with the face-saving exception of commercial service, the light plant could operate at full capacity.

Ole Hanson, however, had other plans. He had sworn in extra police. He had "kept the phone hot" between his office and the Governor's, requesting the services of the National Guard. But, Henry Suzzallo, president of the University Washington and wartime chairman of the State Council of Defense, and Vaughn Tanner, attorney general, who had informally taken the powers of ailing Governor Ernest Lister, phoned Secretary of War Newton Baker for federal troops.

Army trucks rumbled through le streets at dawn on February 6. Machine were set up at strategic points around the The opponents of labor's move into the own were ready. At the ten o'clock deadline all union work ceased in Seattle. Very little activity not specifically allowed by the Executive Committee was carried on. Of the few vehicles on the street that morning, most displayed the sign "Exempt by order of the Strike Committee." An ominous quiet prevailed. The normal police docket of 100 cases a day fell to thirty during the strike. This was to be the mood of the general strike.

The abnormal urban quiet helped breed rumors. It was said that strikers had dynamited the city water supply dam, that Ole Hanson had been assassinated, that private property had been confiscated, that buildings were being blown up, that the army had turned its guns on the strikers. It was also reported that a number of well-to-do Seattle families had left the city as a precaution-
ary measure.

This latter move proved unnecessary, however; neither life nor property was in danger. There was no violence, and all essential services remained in operation.

At first the strike machinery bogged down in a few spots, but it was not long before the initial mistakes were corrected. No one starved, and children got their milk. Considering that labor had to create ad hoc organizations to feed the city and maintain essential services, its strike machinery was astonishingly efficient. Thirtyfive milk-dispensing stations were set up in the residential districts of the city; twenty-one cafeterias serving meals to strikers and nonstrikers alike were created. Hospitals were provided with fresh linen, fuel, and services.

At the outset of the strike, some local newspapers were able to publish abbreviated editions because the international officers of the printing trades forced the Seattle locals to remain on the
job. Their distribution systems were disrupted, however, and they were put into the position of having to give away copies at the plant doors. The message in all editions was substantially the same: the general strike was an attempted revolution.

On the first day of the strike, the large General Strike Committee assembled for the second time. Its members expected to assume the responsibility for running the strike. Again it was too large and unwieldy to make decisions effectively; it merely approved decisions already made by the Executive Committee and requested that the fifteen members continue to take care of exemptions.

The General Strike Committee could feel proud of the way its elected leaders had handled the strike, which had come off smoothly and completely. For all the fulminations of the newspapers and the emergency preparations of Ole Hanson and the army, no active attempt had yet been made to break the strike. The first blow was to descend the next day, Friday, February 7. Hanson issued a proclamation published in a free edition of the Star and distributed by trucks mounting machine guns. In it the mayor promised protection to all the people of Seattle. He threatened all persons violating the law with summary punishment. Sometime later, although the people of Seattle saw no evidence that the strike was collapsing, Hanson released a statement to the United Press claiming that he had suppressed a Bolshevik revolution.

Hanson's great deeds were yet to be performed. Rather than risk trouble by attempting to suppress the strike forcibly, Hanson ordered the labor leaders to call it off. Over the telephone he boldly demanded that James A. Duncan end the strike by noon of that day, Friday. Again, Duncan claimed he lacked authority to control the strike. Hanson then requested that Duncan bring the Executive Committee to his office.

Contrary to his boast that he refused "to treat with these revolutionists," Hanson offered in exchange for an end to the strike his personal pledge to go to Washington to plead the ship- yard workers' case. He threatened, however, that if they did not send the men back to work, he would call in the army.

A labor delegation was informed by Major General John F. Morrison, commander of Federal troops in Seattle, that Hanson did not have the power to declare martial law. Even so, Hanson's maneuvering had left the Executive Committee in a dilemma. Although they realized they had to save face, they also knew the strike could not last indefinitely.

If they ended the strike without gaining more concessions than Hanson was in a position to offer, they feared that internal dissension would disintegrate the labor movement. On the other hand, if they did not end the strike on the unfavorable conditions offered, it might be repressed by force.

The heart of the dilemma was that goals for the strike had never been defined. The Executive Committee, therefore, did not have a set of concrete terms they knew would be acceptable to the rank and file. Hoping to get a better offer than Hanson's, the committee began to dicker with Matthews and Spangler of the Citi- zens Committee.

These gentlemen felt they could not commit their organization without canvassing the opinions of its members. The reply of the Citizens Committee, communicated by Matthews and Spangler to the Executive Committee that evening, was disastrous for labor. They were informed that because the members of the Citizens Committee considered the strike a revolutionary attempt, it would not bargain on surrender terms. Hanson was no longer offering a compromise one moment and a threat the next. He knew now which way to jump. The most influential elements in the community were unalterably opposed to the strike; therefore, so would Ole Hanson be. He sent a formal notice to the Strike Committee, delivered by his secretary, ordering it to call off the strike by eight o'clock the next morning, Saturday, February 8. If they did not comply, he would "take advantage of the protection offered this city by the national government.' '

His timing proved excellent. After two heady days of labor's demonstrated ability to halt the economic life of the city, many of the strikers began to lose their enthusiasm. It was becoming evident that they had no tangible goals or conditions which, if met, could lead to a labor victory. Moreover, their confusion over what they were striking for made it difficult to explain away the charge that the general strike was a revolution.

The eight o'clock deadline passed, and the Executive Committee took no action to halt the strike. Hanson's peremptory order forced the committee into a position where it now could not advocate ending the strike, even though co nservative and progressive clements had earlier backed just such a move. Nevertheless, its resolve to continue the strike could not long remain unbroken. The unity of the strikers had begun to weaken.

Several streetcars had begun to run. Some barbers and restaurant workers returned to their jobs. The privately owned Puget Sound Traction, Light and Power Company plant was put back into full operation.

Pressure on the strikers began to mount. Police arrested Wobbly spokesman Walker C. Smith. The international officers of many of the A.F. of L. unions insisted either in person or by telegram that their local officers order the men back to work.60 In order to stem the tide, the labor newspaper, the Union Record, which had shut down the first day of the strike, resumed publication on February 8.

The Executive Committee realized that the break in labor's solid front would make continuation of the strike foolish. On Saturday afternoon, February 8, it voted 13 to I to call a halt to the general strike at midnight. The resolution was submitted to the General Strike Committee, but its members refused to pass it.

A quiet Sunday helped splinter the resolve of many inactive strikers. It was a day to think, a day when it was not necessary to resist calling off the strike because of pride. On Monday morning the General Strike Committee rcconvened. There were significant gaps in the ranks of the strikers-streetcar men, barbers, stereotypers, teamsters, newsboys, and billposters had returned to work. Representatives of other unions announced on the floor of the meeting that the general strike was causing hardship to some of their members. The strike had disintegrated, and the General Strike Committee knew it.

The Executive Committee again offered a strike-ending resolution; this time it was quickly accepted. The resolution, however, attempted to defy those both inside and outside the labor movement who were pressing for an immediate end to the strike. It specified that the strike was to end at noon on Tuesday, February I 1, and that all those local unions that had returned to work were to come out again so that all members of organized labor could return together.

The response to the second strike call was less than wholehearted; the teamsters and newsboys responded to the call, but the barbers and streetcar men did not. At noon on Tuesday it was all over. As the Star put it, Seattle could go "Full Steam Ahead."

For "Holy Ole" Hanson, the general strike was a good thing. Soon after its termination, his office was flooded with congratulatory inessages from all over the country: he was a national hero.

Ever the opportunist, he resigned his mayoralty in August, 1919, to go on a year-long country-wide lecture tour to tell the people how he beat the "reds." He netted $500 per lecture, $38,000 for the entire tour-a sum five times as large as his mayorally salary of $7,500. The tour was part of a Hanson presidential boom, as were his book, Americanism versus Bolshevism, and several articles. But the Republicans did not nominate Hanson in 1920. He returned to Seattle, sold his real-estate holdings, and retired to California.

As a result of the strike, Seattle labor came upon difficult days. The newspapers thundered editorially that organized labor must purge its ranks of radicals. At first the Union Record replied that the labor movement did not need "Big Biz" to tell it how to run its affairs. But in reality the general strike had destroyed the unity of labor. It was no longer possible for the progressives to slow down the radicals or speed up the conservatives. Factionalism broke out, each group vying for control of organized labor.

Electrical Workers Local 77, its charter revoked by its international, disintegrated. Boilermakers Local 104 was rent with dissension. Bitter jurisdictional disputes broke out among various crafts. And through it all the I.W.W. watched approvingly, hopeful that the A.F. of L. would destroy itself. With no job control by the A.F. of L., the Wobblies believed they would now be able to organize the workingmen of Seattle.

The spectical of each faction blaming the other for the strike's unhappy results disillusioned many of the participants. One very disenchanted radical was Anna Louise StrongWith others of the Union Record staff, she was arrested for the "No One Knows Where" editorial- According to her autobiography, the sedition charge against them was dropped when local Democrats complained to their friends in Washington, D.C., that the arrests would shift Seattle's labor vote to the Farmer-labor party in 1920.

Soon after, Miss Strong left Seattle for a trip to Russia to renew her faith in proletarian causes. She was impressed with what she saw . Subsequently she became one of the most important apologists for the Communist cause writing in English. Her eventual reward for turning out some dozen books and pamphlets lauding Communist achievements and for founding the first English-language newspaper in the Soviet Union was deportation from the "Socialist Motherland" for supposed acts of subversion and espionage. She lives today in Communist China.

Leon Green also had legal difficulties. After the strike, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but it was never served. Said to be of Russian origin, Green, whose real name was reputed to be either Rikowsky or Butowsky, disappeared from the scene as mysteriously as he had appeared. After February 9 he was never again seen in Seattle .

The nonlaboring people of Seattle wanted to see someone punished for the general strike, but it was difficult to find a scapegoat. Police raided the Socialist and I.W.W. halls and arrested thirty-eight Wobblies on suspicion of leading and instigating the general strike.

It was alleged that leadership of the strike was criminal anarchy. Prosecutor Fred C. Brown had no proof that the I.W.W. led the strike, however, and the original indictment was dropped. Then he tried to claim that mere membership in the I.W.W. was illegal under the recently adopted Washington State Criminal Syndicalist Law. The first Wobbly to be tried under the new indictment, James Bruce, was acquitted. The remaining imprisoned Wobblies were released.

In the long run, organized labor in Seattle paid heavily for its general strike.

Immediately after the strike was ended, the Associated Industries of Seattle, a group devoted to fostering the open-shop plan, was formally organized. Backed by the economic power of its corpora - tion members, it flooded the labor movement with spies. It threatened employers in Seattle with withdrawal of supplies if they signed closedshop contracts with unions. It succeeded in breaking the closed shop of the building trades, tailors, and printers.

After the strike, jobs were hard to find in Seattle. The shipyards had closed down. Although this was inevitable after the Armistice,the strike and Piez's cancellation of govemment contracts made the closure quick and sharp rather than gradual.

David Rodger, general manager of Skinner and Eddy, hoped to reopen Skinner's No. 2 yard, for which he claimed he had $40 million in orders; but he said that Associaled Industries forced Skinner not to sell him the yard.70 This was the price labor paid for its general strike.

Was the Seattle General Strike an attempt to overthrow the prevailing political and economic system?

Was it a revolution? It is evident from the actions of the strikers that it was not. But there is another important question yet to be answered. Did a large number of strikers or a significant portion of their leaders intend to stage a revolution and at the last minute, seeing the power of the opposing forces, back down? i think not. The overwhelming majority of the strikers wanted a vehicle through which they could "let off steam" and vent their fears ana frustrations.

They could be urged on by I.W.W. propaganda from without and by I.W.W. borers and free-wheeling radicals from within, but they would not be led by them. They elected an Executive Committee which was conspicuous for its moderation. Although that committee did not always follow their advice, it was in close consultation with progressive leaders such as Duncan, Ault, and Hesketh throughout the strike. But the Greens and the Strongs, although they were not at the locus of power, gave the general strike the reputation of a revolution.

The Seattle General Strike was not a revolution, but it was a revolt-a revolt against everything and therefore a revolt against nothing.

There were too many enemies to thrust out against for labor to be able to define the goals of the strike. This was not unusual; it is in fact typical of nonrevolutionary general strikes called because of the enthusiastic backing of thousands of men. Only if the goals of nonrevolutionary general strikes are narrowly defined and if they are limited in duration', can they be successful. Without narrow goals understood by striker, opponent, and neutral observer, a strike will be treated as a revolution. No one element caused the Seattle General Strike. It occurred only because there were a multiplicity of causes-I.W.W. propaganda giving Northwest workers name familiarity with thr concept of general strike, the class spirit and advanced opinions of Seattle workers, the einotional impact of the Bolshevik Revolution, gen- eral world unrest, the obdurate position taken by the shipyard owners, the intervention of Charles Piez and the United States government, the fear of employer support for the growing open-shop movement, agitation of revolutionary and nonrevolutionary radicals among local labor, and the distinctive Seattle A.F. of L. organization led by James A. Duncan and his progresslves that insisted upon all Seattle workers pulling together and provided a vehicle for such unity.

Separately, not even the dominant causes would have provoked the general strike; rather, it was the combination of extraordinary events and the condition of Seattle labor.

Perhaps one element more important than any other, the one condition without which the strike could not have occurred, was the form into which the Duncanites had molded Seattle labor. This strong organization which used the Central Labor Council to dominate local unions and enforced the habit of working together was, if not the powder which caused the explosion, the fuse without which the powder could not be ignited.

Essentially, the Seattle General Strike . the story of an organization which for a short period was not dominated by its progressive leaders and temporarily got out of control.

Without Duncan and his cohorts at the helm, the organization became the plaything of momentary passions.

Paradoxically, the complexity of the causes of the strike, while a precondition for its very occurrence, also prevented the strike from having any chance of success. When no goals could be stated, when no specific enemies against whom to direct the strike could be named, when no time limit could be set so that the middle class would not take fright, each individual striker was a spokesman for the movement as a whole.

The inability of the official strike leaders to make policy was compounded by the variety of statements issued by rank-and-file strikers and unofficial spokesmen for various factions. Each
man was striking for what he thought important. In the absence of stated goals and motivated readership, the Seattle General Strike was all things to all men.

Robert L. Friedheim, "The Seattle General Strike of 1919," Pacific Northwest Quarterly. LII (July, 1961) p. 81-98.

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SEATTLE GENERAL STRIKE.

Art Shields, "The Seattle General Strike," Solidarity Oral History of the IWW. Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1985 p. 154-156.

I was also active in the Seattle General Strike of 1919, which involved twenty-seven thousand shipyard workers in Seattle, another ten to fifteen thousand in Tacoma, and some more elsewhere. The strike was called by the AFL unions, but behind that was the fact that thousands of Iwws had gone to Seattle to get work in the booming shipyards created by World War I.

There was ideology. The mood was favorable to action. My own union was the most left union in the metal trades. A lot of guys called for the emancipation of the working class. My foreman was an old-line craftsman and he would interrupt, "Brothers, this union is not for the emancipation of the working class; it's for the emancipation of the machinists' "

But the crowd paid little attention to that. The city stopped working. All the restaurants were closed except for the chains operated by the cooks and waiters unions. The diet of beef stew, coffee, and pie was a little monotonous; but non-union men got it for thirty-five cents, union members for twenty-five cents, and if you had no money, the meals were free.

The strike lasted five days. You can't keep a general strike going for long. But it was an extraordinary demonstration of solidarity. Unions established their own municipal functions. They had their own police. The union patrolmen with armbands were on all the streets and kept order.

The government brought in a lot of troops and machine guns but there was nothing for them to do. One of the most dramatic movements for me was at the start of the strike. The Seattle Times was an anti-union newspaper. Its presses were on the street floor behind a long glass window.

The time for the strike was ten a.m. A friend of mine and I were looking through the glass, and at ten sharp, those presses rolled to a stop. What a demonstration of power! Unions had their own daily paper in Seattle for seven or so years, until the mid-1920S.

Art Shields, "The Seattle General Strike," Solidarity Forever, Oral History of the IWW. Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1985 p. 154-155.

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The Seattle General Strike

Harvey O'Conner, "The Seattle General Strike," Revolution in Seattle. New York: The Monthly Review Press, 1964, p. 125-145.

On Armistice Day, 1918, the lid blew off the Seattle labor movement. Nearly two years of pent-up frustration were released in a storm of emotion. In that respect Seattle was no different from the rest of the world. Revolution was the order of the day in Central Europe; the Soviets were battling counter- revolutionaries and Allied intervention; France and Italy were convulsed; in Britain reconstruction of society was the concern of the Labour Party.

In the United States great strikes broke out in steel, focus of industrial feudalism, and in the coal mines and on the railroads.

The same pattern was to be repeated after the Second World War.
Foremost cause of the unrest which swept the country was the constantly soaring cost of living, up 50 percent in three years. Wages in the basic industries had been held under governmental control but there were few countervailing controls on prices.

Huge shipments of food and supplies were being sent to starving Europe and the shortages resulting in this country led enterprisers to charge all that the traffic would bear. At the same time profits were soaring, too, and it was unbearable to thinking workers that the costs of the war should be piled on them while their employers never had it so good.

In Seattle the high cost of living was an especially exasperating prod. The Pacific Northwest had always been a high-price region, far off the beaten track of American commerce; costs of transport whether by ship or rail were padded by the extra profits extracted. Even more than in other sections, the Pacific Northwest regarded itself as in a colonial position, exploited by the Eastern captains of industry.

The abnormal price situation was exaggerated by the influx of thousands of workers, straining the city's housing and public facilities to the breaking point. Landlords reaped a bonanza by heaping men and families into the scant housing available.

Seattle was exceptional also because of the advanced organization of labor - with a total population of 250,000, there were some 60,000 members in unions, flanked as in few other communities by radical wings of the socialists and I.W.W. If a speedy reaction to the release of wartime controls on the right to strike were to be found anywhere in the country, it would logically be in Seattle.

And that was the fact, proudly reported by Anna Louise Strong just back from the Mooney convention in Chicago. In the Union Record she wrote that "Seattle is on the map. . . the place where big constructive ideas come from." She was proud that the Mooney meeting had had its genesis in Seattle.

The 30,000 shipyard workers in the city had been bound by the national A.F. of L. agreement with the War Labor Board which exchanged union recognition for the right to strike in wartime. While the Metal Trades Council held an overall agreement with the yards, neither that Council nor its 21 constituent unions had any final authority in wartime over the wage scales.

That authority rested with the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board, usually called the Macy Board, after its chairman, V. Everit Macy. This had been formed by agreement among the U.S. Emergency Fleet Corporation in charge of shipbuilding, the Navy Department, and the international presidents of the unions involved. The Seattle unions complained vehemently that the international unions, in violation of their own constitutions, had taken control over wages from the rank and file.

The Macy Board twice authorized wage increases in 1917. The unions better organized before the war won an average 60 cents a day rise; those representing mainly the unskilled and semi-skilled, much less. The increase for some of around 121/2 percent contrasted with a rise in living costs during the period of 31 percent.

The top wage for shipyard laborers was $4.16 a day, or a little under $100 a month. The Board's scales were said to be the minimum but in practice they became the maximum and employers were discouraged from paying more. The Board also tried to equalize wages nationally, which of course was detrimental to the Pacific Northwest, where both wages and prices were traditionally higher than on the East and Gulf coasts.

Immediately after the Armistice, the Metal Trades Council demanded a general wage readjustment. Its president, James A. Taylor, went to Washington to confer with Charles Piez, director of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, and with the Macy Board. When that Board's appeal committee split on the Seattle wage issue, Taylor returned to Seattle confident that he had permission to negotiate directly with the shipyards, provided that wage increases did not increase the price of shipping to the government.

A strike vote, preliminary to negotiations, was authorized by the Metal Trades Council in November, 1918, and majorities were received in most unions. On January 16, 1919, negotiations opened on demands for an $8 scale for mechanics, $7 for specialists, $6 for helpers, and 55.50 for laborers.

The Council calculated that its wage demands would leave a profit of $200,000 on each ship, as against the existing $286,000 profit, based on an 8,800-ton ship costing $1,350,000 and sold to the government for $1,636,000. The owners offered increases to the skilled trades but nothing for the unskilled. The skilled trades joined with the mass of the workers in rejecting the splitting tactic.

A Western Union messenger boy helped to precipitate the strike. He bore a telegram addressed to the Metal Trades Association, the employers' body; by mistake he took it to the Metal Trades Council. Its contents were explosive. Director Piez of the Emergency Fleet Corporation had cut through any hope of further negotiation by informing the employers that they would get no more steel if they agreed to any wage increases.

Did Piez act on his own initiative, or was it a double-play between him and the companies? Were the unions up against the government as well as the companies? The Metal Trades Council promptly repudiated the agreement, signed illegally, it claimed, by the chiefs of the national unions without consultation or agreement by the local unions.

On January 16, 1919, the Council authorized a strike, to begin January 21. On that day 30,000 men downed tools, augmented by 15,000 in nearby Tacoma. The yards made no effort to reopen; the unions banned demonstrations, parades, or gatherings, and an unearthly quiet enveloped the yards. To scotch rumors that many of the men were opposed to the strike, Local 104 of the Boilermakers, which comprised nearly half of all strikers, called a meeting to which 6,000 members responded.

Dan McKillop, an official, denounced the shipowners who had taken the credit for the ships built by the workers. "If they think they can build ships, let them go ahead and build them." As for the threat to build ships only in the East, "Well," said McKillop, "let them try it. If they want to start a revolution, let 'em start it."

To bring pressure on the strikers, the Retail Grocers Association decreed that no credit would be extended. The Cooperative Food Products Association, a cooperative formed by unions and the Grange, answered that food would be available to any striker. Thereupon the "dry squad" raided the coop on a liquor warrant. This was an excuse to go through the coop's correspondence and business files, which were confiscated in an effort to put it out of business. The stalemate was complete. The men were adamant; many of the yard bosses had gone to California for a vacation; the government, far from being eager for a settlement, was bombarding the yards with messages to stand firm and resist labor's
demands.

The idea of a general strike swept the ranks of organized labor like a gale. If labor was prepared to strike for Tom Mooney, certainly it could strike in support of the shipyard workers. If the general strike was labor's ultimate weapon, certainly here and now was the time to use it, to break the impending coastwise assault on unionism. Possibly there had never been a more dramatic meeting of the Central Labor Council than that which convened January 22, the floor jammed with delegates from some 110 local unions, and the gallery filled with unionists.

Every reference to the general strike was cheered to the echo; the cautions of the conservatives that such a strike was in violation of many international union rules and of contracts with employers were hooted down. It has been urged since that the absence of some 40 delegates retuming from the Mooney convention gave the "radicals" dominance in the Council's deliberations.

But most of the Mooney delegates were from the very same shipyard unions that were calling for a general strike; if they were willing to go to Chicago to plan a national strike for Mooney, they would hardly have been reluctant to counsel a general strike in Seattle in support of their own fellow workers. If anything, the conservative influence was stronger in the Council that night than usual because the delegates who went to Chicago represented the moderate and radical unions. The conservatives weren't so concerned about Mooney as to travel 2,000 miles to agitate a general strike for him.

The Council's vote that night to hold a referendum among all local unions on the issue of a general strike won the approval of all delegates but one. Scholars, writing a generation later, refer to the "mysterious snowball" of assent that was registered on the very next night in eight local union meetings, whose galleries ff any were certainly not "packed" by Wobblies; "the unanimity of sentiment and the rapidity of assent were astonishing." Perhaps now it seems astonishing, but in Post-Armistice Seattle it was natural and inevitable - this great emotional wave.

By the weekend it was so obvious that the strike votes would carry in most of the locals that a special meeting was called for Monday, January 26. There it was agreed that if the votes continued overwhelmingly in favor, another special meeting of union representatives should be called for Sunday, February 2, to decide on action. The strike votes in the metal trades unions of course were favorable; most of their members were already on strike. The crucial votes were in the old-established locals of the building, teaming, printing, and service trades.

But the painters and carpenters and teamsters and cooks also voted "Yes."

In this they had the unanimous if left-handed support of the business press, which was busy taunting the "radical" leaders of the Central Labor Council that the rank and file, being patriotic Americans, would not strike against the government. Editorialized the Times: "A general strike directed at WHAT? The Government of the United States? Boshl Not 15 percent of Seattle laborites would consider such a proposition."

But consider it they did, and with the greatest enthusiasm!' Edwin Selvin's Business Chronicle, spokesman for the open-shop interests which included most of industry and commerce, helped too. Selvin began inserting lurid advertisements in the business dailies proposing that all radicals be arrested and deported or jailed, that "the most labor-tyrannized city in America" be converted pronto into a bastion of the open shop.

"Here is Seattle's solutlion to its labor problem: As fast as men strike, replace them with returned soldiers." Even conservative unionists who doubted the wisdom of the general strike recoiled when confronted by such evidence from the implacable class enemy.

On February 2 the special meeting of union representatives, ihree from each union, voted to set the strike date for Thursday, February 6. This group constituted itself the General Strike Committee and took over from the Central Labor Council complete authority for the strike. This relieved the Council of direct responsibility for an action which was thoroughly disapproved of by its chartering body, the A.F. of L., and which could result possibly in the revocation of its charter.

Already the international unions were sending in their officials to hold back local unions which had voted to strike. An executive committee of 15 was chosen by the general committee to plan the details of the strike.

On the same day an industrial relations committee of businessmen, clergy, and unionists negotiating with the shipyard owners got a promise to raise laborers to $5 a day minimum, but with
no raise for the skilled trades. The Metal Trades Council spokesmen indicated that the offer could be discussed; but Piez was adamant. Not a ton of steel would be furnished the shipyards
if the Macy award were altered.

Almost immediately the relevancy of Lenin's speech on management, which had aroused so much discussion among workers, became apparent. If the strike were to be completely effective, the Ire of a city of 300,000 would grind to a sudden halt, with catastrophic consequences. If essential services such as light and power, fire protection, hospitals, were to continue, it was up to the Committee of 15 to cope with the problem of civic "manage- ment."

Thousands of single workers ate in restaurants; were they to starve during the strike? How about milk for babies? And how was the strike to be policed? Certainly the unionists had little faith in the impartiality of the custodians of law and order.
An even more crucial question came up at the Committee of 15 meeting on Tuesday, February 4. How long would the strike last?

Was this a demonstration of sympathetic support for the shipyard unions, to be ended as soon as labor had shown where its heart was? Or should it continue until the shipyard owners and the government agreed to confer? The leaders of the Central Labor Council, including Secretary Duncan, Editor Ault, Robert B. Hesketh (a city councilman), and others urged that a time limit be fixed - whether of one day or one week was less important than fixing some terminal date. But such was the wave of emotion that the proposal was defeated; the General Strike Committee was not yet ready to talk about ending a strike that had not even begun.

As a matter of cold fact, just what were the aims of the strike? Most unionists saw it as a demonstration of sympathy, calculated to strengthen the arm of the shipyard unions. Others felt that the first general strike in America would be so conclusive in its show of strength that the walls of Jericho would come tumbling down - not the walls of capitalism, but the walls of pitiless hostility to the earnest demands of the shipyard workers. For the proposed strike slogan, "We have nothing to lose but our chains
and a world to gain," the Committee substituted,

"Together we win."

As if to answer the question about aims of the strike, the Union Record on Tuesday, February 4, published the most famous editorial of its entire history - excerpts of which were read by millions across the country, who by now had their eyes riveted on what some were already proclaiming to be a revolutionary situation. The editorial, written by Anna Louise Strong and approved by Editor Ault and the Metal Trades Council, read, in part:

ON THURSDAY AT 10 A.M.

There will be many cheering, and there will be some who fear.

Both these emotions are useful, but not too much of either.
We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead -NO ONE KNOWS

WHERE.

We do not need hysteria.

We need the iron march of labor.

LABOR WILL FEED THE PEOPLE.
Twelve great kitchens have been offered, and from them food will be distributed by the provision trades at low cost to all.

LABOR WILL CARE FOR THE BABIES AND THE SICK.

The milk-wagon drivers and the laundry drivers are arranging
plans for supplying milk to babies, invalids and hospitals, and taking care of the cleaning of linen for hospitals.

LABOR WILL PRESERVE ORDER.

The strike committee is arranging for guards, and it is expected that the stopping of the cars will keep people at home.

A few hot-headed enthusiasts have complained that strikers only should be fed, and the general public left to endure severe discomfort. Aside from the inhumanitarian character of such suggestions, let them get this straight -

NOT THE WITHDRAWAL OF LABOR POWER, BUT THE POWER OF THE
STRIKERS TO MANAGE WILL WIN THIS STRIKE....

The closing down of Seattle's industries, as a MERE SHUTDOWN, Will not affect these eastern gentlemen much. They could let the whole northwest go to pieces, as far as money alone is concerned.
BUT, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the WORKERS ORGANIZE to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order - THIS will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over Of POWER by the workers.
Labor will not only sIiUT DOWN the industries, but Labor will REOPEN, under the management of the appropriate trades, such activities as are needed to preserve public health and public peace. If the strike continues, Labor may feel led to avoid public suffering by reopening more and more activities,

UNDER ITS OWN MANAGEMENT.

And that is why we say that we are starting on a road that leads -

NO ONE KNOWS WHERE.

It could be said that the editorial contained no clearcut answers to the questions about the purpose of the strike. Or rather it might be more correct to say that people could draw their own answers, to please their own interpretation. To most unionists the editorial stated plainly what was intended: that the city would be shut down but that essential services for life and security would continue.

But others could read in ominous ideas that the workers, having shut down the industries, would reopen them on their own terms. Most of all the phrase that "we are Starting on a road that leads - NO ONE KNOWS WHERE," created an alarm that Seattle labor was leading down the road to revolution. But the sentence meant exactly what it said - this was the first use of the general strike weapon anywhere in America, and who could foretell the outcome?

Undoubtedly, in Miss Strong's mind, there were the undertones of Lenin's speech on worker management but such notions were hardly in the heads of leaders of the Central Labor Council. They were launched on a trade union trial of strength, and not a revolution.
But there were people who did see the shipyard and the general strikes in revolutionary terms. Since the death of the Daily Call, the socialists had been publishing the International Weekly. The editors of this paper felt that the situation called for drastic action by labor.

They weighed not only Lenin's speech on worker management but Lenin's previous actions in the seizure of power. And so they called bluntly and sharply for a revolutionary solution - let the shipyard workers take over the yards and operate them for the benefit of the workers. This idea, expressed editorially in the International Weekly, was put into a leaflet. Morris Pass, the artist, drew a cartoon showing a huge figure of Labor pushing a fat little capitalist into a coffin.

Over this appeared the caption RUSSIA DID IT, a take-off on the slogan in the current Victory Bond drive, THE YANKS DID IT. Underneath appeared the editorial appealing to the shipyard workers. While the leaflet's contents appealed to many strikers, no union endorsed its proposal. Nevertheless the little socialist handbill was reproduced far and wide across the nation subse- quently to give substance to the notion that the general strike was revolutionary in intent.

A resolution offered by socialist unionists in the Central Labor Council February 5 echoed the sentiments of the leaflet. If the strike is prolonged and the employers refuse to reach a settlement, the resolution advised, the strike committee should arrange to "take over the shipbuilding industry, eliminate the bosses, and operate it in the interests of the workers." The resolution was tabled.

As the fateful day of Thursday, February 6, neared, tension mounted. The more fearful among the upper classes departed for California to eseape the rigors of revolution.

Those of such persuasion who remained at home laid in stocks of food, kerosene, and candles against the dreadful nights ahead. Others cleaned their guns or acquired small arsenals the better to resist the hordes of Wobblies who presumably would roam the city, sacking, looting, and raping. The gun stores saw a windfall in prospect. Letters went out to selected lists such as
this:

Dear Fellow Kiwanian: Are you prepared? Not only to assist, if necessary, in controlling the despicable human element which has sprung up in our midst, but to defend, if necessary, the sanctity of your home and aid in protecting the property and wealth of the community? Although there has been a considerable scarcity of all firearms during recent months, we are fortunate in having in stock, at the present time, a very good assortment of revolvers, automatic pistols, rifles, shotguns and ammunition.

Correspondents for Eastern newspapers and magazines began arriving to see for themselves how a revolution is conducted in the United States. The local business dailies became shrill.


UNDER WHICH FLAG? asked the Star, in an editorial spread across the front page. In answer to the Star, the Union Record said:

Sane men there are, some, who believe that in the end all peaceful means to abolish the profit system will fail, and the age-long struggle between the suppressors and the oppressed will close with violence. But no sane man believes that time is now.

The Star pretends to believe that the unarmed and defenseless workers mean to capture City Hall and run up the Red Flag in spite of the fact that it knows that the workers know that there are thousands of soldiers at Camp Lewis and Fort Lawton.... No revolution of violence will be started during this strike, be the strike long or short.

Said Selvin of the Business Chronicle in editorials which he ran as advertisements in the business dailies:

Seattle today is overrun by red-flag agitators in the guise of "labor leaders.:' This is the attitude of the renegades the business men of this city have coddled, hesitated to "irritate," and subsidized in spreading their corroding propaganda by supporting with advertising the anarchistic Daily Union Record, without which the Bolsheviki would not now be in the saddle in Seattle.

"So now we have the Seattle of today - once a proud city brought to the brink of industrial ruin; the Seattle that has come to be known throughout the length and breadth of the land as a hotbed of sedition, branded by the Department of justice as one of two cities that constitute the danger points of revolutionary Bolshevik propaganda.

At the Labor Temple the Committee of 15 worked from early morning till midnight dealing with the problems of keeping the city a going concern during the shutdown. A call went out to returned veterans, members of organized labor, to enlist in the Labor War Veterans Guard to maintain law and order during the strike, and 300 responded. Exemptions were granted from the strike as local unions brought in their problems involving the health of the city.

A sampling of the exemption requests and the decisions of the Committee of 15:

King County commissioners ask for exemption of janitors to care for the City-County Building. Not granted.

Janitors ask for the Labor Temple. Not granted.
Additional staff for the Cooperative Market to handle food for strike kitchens. Approved.

Port of Seattle asks to be allowed to load a government vessel, pointing out that no private profit is involved and an emergency exists. Granted.

Garbage wagon drivers ask instructions. May carry such garbage as tends to create an epidemic, but no ashes or papers. Wagons to carry large signs: Exempt by Strike Committee.

Retail drug clerks ask instructions. Told that drug stores must be closed except for prescription service.

To many citizens the most frightening aspect of the approaching tie-up was the threat by Leon Green, business agent of Electrical Workers Local 77, to shut down the City Light plant. This would plunge the city into darkness, cut off the water supply to many parts, and affect many essential services. As it turned out, the threat was an empty one; Local 77's membership was confined chiefly to linemen and did not include most of the operators within the light plant itself. But either this was not realized at the time, or else the threat was blown up out of all reason for political purposes by the mayor of Seattle, Ole Hanson. The spotlight shifted from the Labor Temple and the Committee of 15 to focus on the persons of Leon Green and Ole Hanson.

Green was a newcomer in Seattle. Handsome, dark-haired, voluble, dynamic, he was elected business agent because no other member cared to leave a steady job to take over that position. He shared with Mayor Hanson one attribute - a love of limelight. In an interview with the P-I he was quoted as saying: "We shall place the city in such a position [by shutting down City Light] that the strike will last but a feiv short days." Green's favorite phrase was, "We must use our Economic Power."

Mayor Hanson was feeling his way toward the best political posture. He was in and out of the Labor Temple, greeting officials there intimately as "Jimmy...... Harry," and "Jack," asking only, he Said, that essential light and water service be assured. Meeting Hulet Wells, a member of the strike committee, in the corridor, to that socialist leader he expressed his admiration: "I don't care what they say about you - let the newspapers rave as they please - but no one can make me believe that you are not one of the finest of our citizens."

A few months later he was saying that Wells should be kept in prison for the rest of his life.

The Committee of 15 overruled Leon Green and informed Hanson that City Light would operate. But by then Hanson had dropped his air of familiarity with the Labor Temple; he had seen the vision, bathed in a national spotlight, of himself as the hero who smashed the Seattle "Revolution." He swore in extra police and summoned Governor Lister to rush in the National Guard.

President Henry Suzzallo of the University of Washington, chairman of the State Council of Defense, beat him to the punch and demanded that Secretary of War Baker send in federal troops. As was usual during strikes, students at the University, most of whom came from the middle and upper classes, were paid to act as guards in their ROTC uniforms "to help save the world from the Bolsheviki."

Army trucks entered the city in the early morning hours of Thursday, February 6, from Camp Lewis, the Army's West Coast concentration center near Tacoma. Machine gun nests were mounted at strategic points. The United States Government was taking no chances with the Labor Temple.

At 10:00 A.M. that Thursday the general strike began. Street cars headed for the barns, trucks for the garages, transportation ceased. Second Avenue, then the main thoroughfare, was silent and empty from the Washington Hotel down to Yesler Way. At a few minutes before ten the pressmen at the Times and other papers began covering the presses with tarpaulins. Silence reigned over the city. Here and there small groups of unarmed men with armbands - the Labor Guards - patrolled the streets, with orders to disperse any gatherings of union men. But there were no gatherings of any kind to disperse - public transportation was at a standstill and in any event unionists had been advised to stay at home for the duration.

The peace that had descended was disturbed only by Mayor Ole Hanson. From City Hall he thundered a proclamation on Friday, the second day of the strike:

I hereby guarantee to all the people of Seattle absolute and com- plete.protection. They should go about their daily work and busi- ness in perfect security. We have 1,500 policemen, 1,500 regular soldiers from Camp Lewis, and can and will secure, if necessary, every soldier in the Northwest to protect life, business and property.

The time has come for the people of Seattle to show their Ameri- canism. Go about your daily duties without fear. We will see to it that you have food, transportation, water, light, gas and all neces-
sities.

The anarchists in this community shall not rule its affairs.
All persons violating the laws will be dealt with summarily.

The proclamation was all huff and puff. People stayed home. The New York Tribune's correspondent, sent out at some expense to cover a revolution, reported that "there was absolutely no problme." The normal Police docket of a hundred a day fell to about 30." Mayor Hanson had sworn in 600 extra police and deputized 2,400 more at a cost to the city of $50,000. But the commanding general of the U.S. troops brought into the city said he had never seen such a quiet and orderly city. The Star managed to get out a bobtailed edition with the few printers working, distributed free from trucks manned by police with machine guns.

It was headed, in red ink, SEATTLE, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, across the top of the page. It boasted that clubs, revolvers, rifles, carbines, automatics, and machine guns were being distributed among the fearful. It reported that trucks, sandbagged and with machine guns able to sweep the streets, were lumbering up and down the main avenues of the city. But there was nobody there to shoot down. Rumors spread fast.

The strikers had dynamited the city's water supply dam, Ole Hanson had been assassinated, buildings were being blown up and troops ivere engaged in bloody battles with strikers on downtown streets. In all this Mayor Hanson was hardly a help. To eager newspaper correspondents he was already proclaiming that he had quelled, almost single-handed, an attempted Bolshevik revolution.

Newspapers in the East greedily gulped down such news, as the nation gaped with bated breath for the outcome of this killer-diller thriller. Hanson telephoned Secretary Duncan to demand that the strike be ended forthwith. Although he refused "to treat with these revolutionists" in statements he gave the wire services, he invited the Committee of 15 to City Hall and promised if the strike were ended that he personally would go to Washington to plead the shipyard workers' case. If not, he would call out the army and declare martial law - a prerogative beyond his power.

The P-I in a front page editorial thundered: "The issue is no longer in doubt; the leaders of the revolt are openly proclaiming that the shipyard strike is only a pretext; that it is a camouflage. It is not a strike; it is a delirium-born rebellion." The Star chimed'in: "A part of our community is, in fact, defying our government and is, in fact, contemplating changing that government, and not by American Methods. This small part of our city talks plainly of 'taking over things,' of 'resuming under our own management."'

In the meantime the strike machinery was working a lot more fficiently than the most hopeful had expected. Thirty-five milk stations were functioning in the residential sections; 21 cafe- terias were serving meals for 25 cents apiece to union men, for 35 cents to others; hospitals were getting their linen and fuel. A union card was the only credential for the 25-cent meal, and an I.W.W. card was as good as an A.F. of L. The Japanese Labor Association, comprising hotel and restaurant workers, struck in sympathy with the labor movement which had never recognized them nor even regarded them as a part of unionism. The I.W.W. saw to it that the ginmills on the skid road were shut down (Washington had had official prohibition since 1916) and that I.W.W. members kept off the streets.

The exhilaration from the marvellous display of solidarity experienced Thursday and Friday began by Saturday to give way to apprehension. The purpose of the strike was to help the
shipyard workers get an honorable settlement of their wage demands. But nobody on the other side seemed inclined to negotiate anything.

While Mayor Hanson's fulminations helped to keep up the backs of unionists, the ominous silence in Washington was dismaying. It had been assumed that the general strike would shock officialdom into action and negotiation. No one had questioned that the government would insist on a settlement of some kind. It was assumed that ships were needed, and the government would come to terms. But the war was over and while more shipping was needed to replace the tonnage sunk by German submarines, there was no longer any great urgency about it.

The shipyards along the East and Gulf Coasts and in California continued operating. The truth was that Seattle was expendable, despite its record-breaking speed in delivering ships. For all Washington cared, the Seattle yards could remain closed; moreover it was desirable that the unions be taught a lesson...

That the shipyards were expendable was apparent enough to the Citizens Committee, headed by a distinguished divine and an eminent banker. The Committee of 15 was informed that because the strike was considered a revolutionary attempt, it would not bargain on surrender terms. Call off the strike, and then, perhaps....
From the Citizens Committee Mayor Hanson got his cue.

Friday evening he ordered the Committee of 15 to end the strike Saturday morning, or else. His "or else" was an empty threat but it had the effect of stiffening opposition among unionists to yielding to such pressure.

Far more effective were the threats of international union officials to revoke local union charters, particularly in the printing trades. Small editions of the dailies began to appear. On Saturday a few unions returned to work; that afternoon the Committee of 15 voted 13 to I to end the strike at midnight. Although several more unions had voted the same day to return, the General Strike Committee, with final authority, voted to continue the strike by 76 to 45.
In late afternoon it had seemed that the vote to end the strike was assured; but after a dinner recess several unions changed their position upon the urging of the metal trades and longshore unions.

The General Strike Committee met again Monday morning and then adopted the motion to end the strike. More unions had gone back to work, but others which had returned Saturday voted to resume the strike and bring it to an end with united ranks at noon Tuesday, February 11. The strike had lasted five working days.

For the majority of Seattle unions, there was no sense of defeat as the strike ended. They had demonstrated their solidarity- with their brothers in the yards, and the memory of the great days when labor had shown its strength glowed in their minds. It was not until many years later, in a very different climate of opinion, that some of the leaders began apologizing for what could be excused as a momentary aberration by an otherwise solid body of citizenry.

It became needful to rewrite history, to blame the general strike on "radicals" or "the I.W.W. element." Forgetful of the evident fact that the strike was voted by some 300 delegates chosen for the purpose from a hundred local unions, almost unanimously, and that none but these regular delegates and their Committee of 15 made the decisions, some have apologized for the great general strike of Seattle as merely an incident to be forgotten, glossed over, or explained away.

The Central Labor Council resumed its normal position in the movement on Wednesday, February 12, the day after the strike ended. Delegates reviewed the impressive achievements of the committees which had carried out the tasks assigned them in guarding against violence, in feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and keeping essential services running. Chairman Ben F.Nauman of the strike committee summed up: "We did something in this strike which has never been done before by the A.F. of L. We pulled off a general strike with craft unions, with ironclad contracts which had to be broken, and with a constitution that had to be ignored." There had been two mistakes, he said: the failure to decide on the duration of the strike at the beginning, and the failure to call it off Saturday night when it became evident that the ranks were breaking.

Absent from the Council meeting was the business agent for the Electrical Workers union, Leon Green. He who had bluffed Mayor Ole Hanson on shutting down City Light and had provided most of the fireworks that spread the idea of a heartless attempt to crush the life out of a city, had left Seattle never to return.

In 1923 a story in the Union Record reported that Green had been found guilty by the Chicago retail clerks' union, of which he was business agent, and by the United Hebrew Trades of accepting a $3,000 bribe from the Retail Merchants Association while negotiating a new contract. He was expelled.

From the general strike arose a Knight of Reaction in shining armor. Ole Hanson, often referred to as "Holy Ole," became the nine-day darling of the nation's open shoppers. Messages of congratulation showered upon him from New York, Washington, Chicago, and way points. He did nothing to dispel the myth that single-handed he had slain the dragon of anarchy.

Overcome by the adulation and feeling Seattle to be too narrow an arena for a man of his talents, he resigned the mayor's chair in August, 1919, for a year-long lecture tour on the theme of Americanism vs. Bolshevism, which he elaborated into a book. Always a man with an eye on the main chance, he left a job paying $7,500 to lecture at $500 an audience, or $38,000 for the entire tour. He was even boomed for the presidency, but the "Massachusetts Ole Hanson," Calvin Coolidge, beat him to the draw by quelling the Boston police strike to become reaction's newest hero and Republican candidate for the vice-presidency.

By 1920 Ole's message had been drowned out in the national anti-red hysteria which he had helped to whip up. He returned to Seattle to dispose of his real estate interests and retire to southern California, the realtor's haven, pursued by ugly rumors about his part in the purchase by the city of the street car system from the Stone SC Webster interests.

To a former police official, writing years later in the Seattle police magazine, "Hanson was the type of man who so frequently appears in Seattle's chronicles as a mayor. He was energetic and picturesque, made rabblerousing speeches, but did not say anything and accomplished even less. As a result of the way he conducted himself during the strike, he became a Chamber of Commerce hero everywhere but in Seattle."

Seattleites read with some astonishment the lurid accounts of the izeneral strike which appeared in the nation's leading magazines. To the Saturday Evening Post it was evident that "bolshevism has put forth its supremest effort in America and has failed." There followed a curious tale, typical of that hysterical period. "The I.W.W. themselves," said the Post "openly boast that the Russian revolution was planned in the office of a Seattle lawyer, counsel for the organization, during those three overheated days wherein Lenin and Trotsky tarried in the city's midst, en route to Russia; and that an American revolution was planned or at least discussed at the same time."

The Post referred to "an especially illuminating little treatise in booklet form entitled Russia Did It, by an ambitious young Bolshevik author who, alas, now languishes behind prison bars in lieu of $10,000 bail. Two and a half tons of this booklet alone were distributed. Equity [the socialist-I.W.W. print shop] ran its presses frantically day and night." Alas, too, for the truth: it wasn't a booklet but a rather small leaflet; the "Bolshevik author" far from languishing in jail was working to help Armour's construct a huge agricultural irrigation project in the Sutter Basin of California; the leaflet was issued in a modest quantity of 20,000 amounting only to several pounds weight in all; and Equity managed to get its work done in one eight-hour shift each day.

World's Work, then a leading national magazine, was not to be outdone by the Post. A full-page photo of Mayor Hanson was captioned:

A citizen of Norwegian ancestry who, by a quick display of intelligent energy, crushed @n a few hours a Bolsfievist outbreak in the city of Seattle, over which he rules as mayor. A conglomeration of aliens from Russia and Finland attempted to give American "Bolshevism" an example by establishing a Soviet -, in this Washington city, but Mayor Hanson, by the prompt announcement that the headquarters of the city government was the City Hall and that the first "reformer" to interfere with its. operations would be shot, immediately dissolved the "revolution " The aliens who started the disturbance have been deported to their European homes.

Sunset, the Pacific Coast monthly, did not intend to lag behind its Eastern competitors: "Instead of crawling into the cyclone cellar, Seattle walked right up to the gate, a gun in either hand, to meet the Social Revolution."

Closer to home, the Post-Intelligencer joined the chorus. Proclaiming February 1 1 that "The Revolution is Over," the P-I editorialized:

Whatever may have been the motives of the rank and file of the strikers, those who engineered the strike did so with the hallucination that the whole country would flame into revolution. In fact, the idea of revolution was the sole idea with any logical foundation for the whole undertaking.... The revolution is at an end. The serpent head of Bolshevism has been crushed under the heels of an onward-marching citizenry led by a fearless mayor.

To this the Union Record responded:

If by revolution is meant violence, the killing or maiming of men, surely no group of workers dreamed of such action. But if by revolution is meant that the Great Change is coming over the face of the world, which will transform our method of carrying on industry and will go deep into the very source of our lives, to bring joy and freedom in place of heaviness and fear -then we do believe in such a Great Change and that the General Strike was one of the definite steps toward it.... Some day when the workers have learned to manage, they will Begin Managing.

Truth was, a revolutionary spark did exist in Seattle in February, 1919. The strike leaders knew that as well as the government, and were mortally frightened. For that reason unionists were ordered to remain at home and avoid any gatherings; the Union Record was ordered not to ublish; no incident was to be permitted that might flare into p provocation of the Army and the thousands of armed vigilantes.

By the third day of the strike they realized that the Seattle labor movement stood all alone; the strike wave did not even spread down the coast to California nor was there any move across a nation falling under the spell of the anti-Red hysteria to give aid and comfort, even verbally, to the labor morements of Seattle and Tacoma. Seattle, unfortunately, was all too unique in its militancy.

Harvey O'Conner, "The Seattle General Strike," Revolution in Seattle. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964, p. 125-145.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SEATTLE GENERAL STRIKE

Ottilie Markholt, How shall we remember the Seattle General Strike.


How shall we remember the 1919 Seattle general strike? Shall we celebrate it as a triumphant assertion of working people's power? Or mourn it as a disaster heralding years of blacklist and open shop? Or dismiss it as the fantastic adventure of radicals rehearsing the revolution they sought? Beyond the conclusions of the General Strike Committee's official history let's see how the participants evaluated their strike and how it affected their lives.

"The general strike put into our hands the organized life of the city all except the declared Anna Strong. *W did 60.,000 union men and women take over their city?

Wartime Seattle threatened to burst at the seams, Population grew from 237,000 in 1910 to 315,312 ten years later. From 1914 to 1919 the number of manufacturing employees increased more than threefold to over 40,000. Of these 35,000 worked in the shipbuilding industry. Gigantic proportions defined wartime plants Seattle yards constructed 26.5 percent of all ships built for the Emergency Fleet Corporation. In November 1918 Seattle's Skinner and Eddy,, the largest yard in the nation had produced more ships than any other for the United States government. Paying above average wages, the yard lured thousands of experienced workers to Seattle and employed about 15,000 in 1918.

Rent hogs gouged the newcomers and inflation devoured their paychecks. Nationally from 1914 to 1920 the cost of Iiving rose 90 percent with food prices doubled.

Many of the newcomers joined unions. From 1915 to 1919 membership
in the 130 local unions increased over fourfold, from 15, 000 to 65,000 while membership in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) nationally doubled.

The unions spanned the ideological spectrum from the conservative Federal Employees local that opposed a general strike and denounced Bolsheviks, to avowed Socialists and syndicalists,, who called upon working people to take over the means of production and abolish capitalism. The whole movement tilted to the left.

James Duncan, secretary of the Central labor Council, led the reform bloc advocating industrial unionism in the AFL nationally.

Hulet Wells, a Socialist, sent to prison for opposing the draft,, was a delegate to and former president of the council. The movement boasted the only labor-owned daily newspaper in the country, the Union Record with a circulation of 50,000. On the fringe of the movement a vigorous socialist party contributed activists to the local unions and central council.

Many members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) also carried cards in AFL unions, bringing with them a militant program of class struggle. Both these organizations published weekly papers.

The wartime labor shortage fostered working people's confidence in their power. Goaded by the high cost of living hundreds of unionists gained wage increases in short strikes. They included passenger car cleaners at the King Street Station in a four-day strike, milk wagon drivers after nine hours and coal packers and laundry drivers atfer seven days.

Packing house workers won raises and a shortened work day. Besides defending their living standards with economic strikes against their own employers, Seattle unionists demonstrated their solidarity with the Timber Workers Union in a massive sympathetic strike. In September 1917, 5,000 carpenters and caulkers struck rather than handle ten-hour lumber produced by scabs.

Overnight, World War I created an enormous demand for ships to carry goods and soldiers to Europe, and an imperative need for a stable labor force to build those ships. As in other essential war indutries the federal government intervened decisively oganizing the Emergency Fleet Corporation in April 1917 to oversee construction of shipyards and vessels.

Then representatives of the government and shipyard unions agreed to formation of the Shipbuilding labor Adjustment Board, composed of a representative of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, a represenative of shipyard labor and chaired by V. Everit Macy,, a New York bank director, appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to represent the public.

Shipyard workers organized in craft unions bargained with their employers through local Metal Trades councils. Instead of individual craft agreements, the Metal Trades Council developed a blanket agreement covering all crafts. The councils could bargain directly with all yards without government interference, but in large yards working on contracts for government-owned vessels the Emergency Fleet Corporation claimed the right to regulate wages.

With the cost of living rising, in July 1917 the Seattle Metal Trades Council demanded $6.00 a day for skilled workers and comensurate increases for other classifications. Some shipyards agreed; others refused pleading inability to bargain independently.

Failing to get help frm the Macy Board, 12,,000 metal workers struck Seattle shipyards September 29. The Macy Board hastened west to hold hearings and adjust wages. The men accepted mediation and returned to work October 23.

After conductirg hearings up and down the coast in December 1917 the Macy Board set uniform wage scales. For Seattle these rates resulted in some crafts received 60 cents a day more than they had requested and most of the basic shipyard trades 22 cents less than the rates in other yards and shops.

Rather than reduce the journeyman rate 25 cents, the board allowed the Seattle yards to pay $5.50 a day, Patriotic sentiments kept angry shipyard workers on the job during 1918 while they appealed vainly for relief to protect their eroding standard of living.

Based on continued rising prices the Seattle Metal Trades Council asked the Macy Board to allow wages ranging fron $8.00 a day for journeymen to $5.50 for laborers. With Seattle yards over the Macy ceiling, Charles Piez director of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, promised James A. Taylor, president of the Seattle Metal Trades, that he would not interfere in direct negotiations with Seattle shipbuilders, with the understanding that the government would not reimburse the builders for wages in excess of Macy scales.

The new Macy award, handed down November 8, gave journeymen $6.40 a day and laborers $4.64, amounting to wage cutting according to the Union Record. The rate for the unskilled probably 80 percent of the workers, was about $500 a year less than the minimum income required to sustain a family of four. The next day the Pacific Coaal District Metal Trades Council rejected the award and appealed the decision. The Armistice November 11 released the shipyard workers from their wartime no strike obligation.

The 32,000 workers represented by the Seattle Metal Trades Council belonged to seventeen unions ranging from the Boilemakers with 15,OOO members, the largest local union in the country, to unions with a few hundred members.

Losing the appeal, the Metal trades unions took a strike vote and prepared to negotiate directly for the wages the Macy-Board had refused. The strike vote carried decisively and negotiations produced no results. Reneging on his promise not to interfere in negotiations, Piez threatened the shipbuilders with loss of their steel allotment if they agreed to union demands.

On January 21, 1919, 32,000 workers struck the Seattle shipyards.

That night the Metal Trades Council asked the Central labor Council to poll the affiliated unions for a general strike in support of the shipyard workers. The delegates assented "with cheers for the solidarity of solidarity of labor and without a dissenting vote," Hulet Wells declared: "Seattle is one place where a universal strike can be pulled off with success, I am confident
that the shipyard workers could win alone. . . . But if we win it with a universal strike., every union in the city will get the benefit of the victory.

Some delegates wanted a mass strike in which each union "should list all its grievances and go out in a battle royal with all the employers, no union to go back until every organization's troubles have been settled." But the majority favored a sympathetic strike.. believing that solidarity consisted in going down the line together for the metal trademnen and especially for the laborer and helper,"

Andy Mulligan of the Boilermakers wanted "a clean cut demonstration of the economic power of organized labor or call it off." Dismissing radical rhetoric, James Duncan summed up: "This is an issue that cannot easily be befogged. It is all right to talk about the revolutions but some of us are not revolutionists. . . . The issue is whether representatives of this government can treat their workers as scraps of paper.

Seattle union people already knew about general strikes. Their delegates had just returned from the Chicago congress to initiate a nationwide referendum for a series of general strikes to free Tom Mooney and Warren Billings from prison.

The congress agreed to ballot on calling five-day general strikes in July.. September., and November, to culminate in an indefinite general strike if Mooney and Billings remained in jail. Moreover IWW members, Wobblies, had been talking for years about the general strike to take over the means of production and abolish capitalism.

Most local unions and councils endorsed the general strike enthusiastically and elected their three delegates to the General Strike Committee. Many Seattle unionists., as well as labor generally believed that the war's end and return to "normalcy" signaled a massive open-shop drive to wipe out their unions and drive down their living standards.

Therefore they must unite all their strength to repen this combined attack of employers and government. Defeat of the shipyard workers would break the Seattle union movement. For their motto the strikers rejected the stirring sentiment of the Communist Manifesto., "We have nothing to lose but our chains and a world to win." in favor of the slogan on patriotic postersp "Together We Win."

War's end also brought demobilized soldiers and sailors needing jobs. The Seattle Metal Trades Council sponsored organization of a Workers Soldiers and Sailors Council to assist the veterans and prevent their being used to break strikes. Affiliated locals subscribed $15,000 to support the organization.

Socialists became active in the council, "Local Soviet Declares for End of Capitalist Exploitation." their paper headlined. The Russian word soviet meant council. Many Socialists., some of whom would soon leave the party to form the American Communist parties,, believed that the Bolshevik revolution and the Russian Soviets pointed the way to their goal.

The preamble of the constitution declared: "The purpose of the Council of Workers, Soldiers and Sailors is to organize all members of the working class into one organization and train them in the principles of mass action in order that we may realize that accumulation of energy, that concentration of force and continuity of resistance necessary to strike the final blow against capitalism."

The General strike Committee numbering some 345 delegates, set about organizing the details of the strike. They rejected the plea of James Duncan and others to hold the actual strike in abeyance as a threat to deter the shipyards from reopening with scabs.

Nor would they set a limit on the duration. The strike would begin on Thursday morning., February 6, to last indefinitely. The Metal Trades Council promised that if none of their members would return to work until all the other unions who participated in the general strike returned to their former positions.," and, accorcing to the Longshoremen's minutes, the General Strike Committee recommended "that there will be no settlement of the strike when called until all organizations return to work with at least as favorable conditions as those enjoyed previous to the strike."

Many workers interpreted these statements as protect on against discrimination if they struck.

Although the General Strike Committee planned carefully to provide
for Seattle citizens and insure a peaceful strike, it said little about concrete demands, Instead before the strike. The Union Record carried an ambiguous editorial written by Anna Louise Strong, quoted "from coast to coast as a sign of revolutionary intention":

"We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country,, a move that will lead--NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!. . . NOT THE WITHDRAWAL OF LABOR BUT THE POWER OF THE STRIKERS TO MANAGE WILL WIN THIS STRIKE . . . . labor will not only SHUT DOWN the industries but labor will REOPEN., under the management of the appropriate trades . . . If the strike continues, labor may feel led to avoid public suffering by reopening more and more activities. . . . UNDER ITS OWN MANAGEMENT . And that is why we say that we are starting on a road that leads-NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!

The capitalist press pounced on the editorial as Bolshevik propaganda. The Socialists did, in fact,, call for the revolution in a leaflet written by Harvey O'Connor and distributed February 2 entitled., "Russia Did It":

You have built the ships for our boss. They did not build them for yourselves? Why not own and control, through your unions,, YOUR jobs and YOUR shipyards? Why not dictate yourselves the number of hours you should work.. the conditions under which you work, the pay you should receive for your labor?

The Russians have shown you the way out. What are you going to do about it? You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have not one thing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers., must take over the control of your jobs, and through them the control over your lives instead of offering yourselves up to the masters as a sacrifice six days a week so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil.

The strikers disclaimed the leaflet as unauthorized Wobbly propaganda. But the Wobblies did not advocate revolution. Instead, the "Strike Bulletin" of the IWW Shipbuilders Industrial Union declared February 1:

Every union man knows that if the shipyard workers strike can be broken by the companies, every union in Seattle might as well go out of business because the companies will not rest now until they smash unionism or are thoroughly and decisively beaten by the organized workers.

This is a clean cut issue between unionism and the open shop. They may cry "I.W.W." "Bolsheviki influence." but the fact remaining and union men know it, that this is a fight to a finish, the outcome of which will demonstrate whether the workingman has a right for higher wages so he and his family can get the good things of life.

On Thursday morning., February 6, some 28,000 working men and woman struck in sympathy with the shipyard workers,, many of them breaking union agreements to participate. The General Strike Committee exempted federal employees and a few weak or essential unions. Several refused to strike., notably the printing trades.

The Socialist International Weekly headlined the next day: "CAPITALISM TOTTERS" Can 60,000 Workers Operate Industry Without Bosses?" The paper predicted that "here in Seattle peacefully and without violence, may transpire the revolutionary change in the management of industry from the present exploiters to the workers."

"Now's the Day." the paper challenged. "Choose you Must. Either be whipped slave and eat out of the master's hand or be men,, free men among men."

Mayor Ole Hanson,, the employers,, and the press unleashed a hysterical campaign against the strikers, demanding "unconditional surrender" from "these revolutionists."

The "Official Central Labor Council Strike Bulletin" February 7 congratulated the strikers in their orderly conduct. Declaring Charles Piez "wholly responsible for local tie-up.." the bulletin explained: "The purpose of the general strike is to, bring into action every local influence to the end that the right of local shipyard workers to negotiate directly with their employers may be established."

The General Strike Committee rejected a resolution from its Executive Committee to terminate the strike at midnight Saturday. The strike ended officially, on Tuesday,, February 11,, although many locals had already returned to work under pressure of their international or local officers or employers. The next night Ben Nauman, chair of the General Strike Committee,, delegate from the Stationary Engineers, and assistant city boiler inspector, reported to the Central labor Council: "-we did something in this strike which has never been done before by the A.F. of L. We pulled off a general strike with craft unions with ironclad contracts which had to be broken,, and with a constitution which had to be ignored."

He pointed out two mistakes, failure to set a definite limit at the outset and failure to end the strike on Saturday night. "But for all that he said., while the strike did not accomplish the immediate result for which it had been definitely called, it -was a tremendous success . It has shown the solidarity of labor and its power.

Nauman condemned the radical attempt to deflect the council from its rightful purpose,': "I don't believe that the Central labor Council should be used as a general clearing house for other propaganda. The Central Labor Council has its own function to inform for the labor movement. The boast of Bolshevism and the boast of revolution had no business to be thrust into this campaign., and I do not believe it has any business in the Central Labor Council.

Employers and the press seized on Nauman' s statement. "LABOR COUNCIL TO OUST RADICALS.," the Seattle Times headlined, and employers urged labor in a full-page ad: "Let's Clean House."

The Shipyard laborers, Riggers and Fasteners replied to the employers with a resolution passed by the Metal Trades Council and introduced in the Central Labor Council February 19. It proc@ed defiantly:

We hasten to assure the draft-slacking publisher of the Star all the employers who hate labors and all those who love to lick their boots., that we know exactly what they mean by "reds.," we know exactly what they mean by "Bolsheviks," exactly what they mean by cleaning house; that organized labor in Seattle was never so proud of itself, that it appreciates the reds the more for the enemies they have made, that it has no intention of cleaning house to please its opponents.. and that the general strike is permanently in the arsenal of labor's peaceful weapons.16

After a furious debate the resolution went to committee. The Produce Workers some of whose members had been locked out after the strike., answered February 26 with a resolution providing that Central Labor Council delegates must be 11100 per cent American Federation of Labor followers and in no way owing obligation to any other workers, organization.,,17 "Renew Efforts to Curb Radical Labor Element" the Times crowed, as this resolution also went to committee.
The council debated both resolutions March 5. "When did the Chamber of Commerce ever take advice from organized labor?" demanded Roy Hays of the Longshoremen, "And why should we take advice from the Chamber of Commerce or other business interests?" Hulet Wells admitted ruefully during the debate: "Our recent general strike,,
I think have convinced most of us that the general strike is never going to come into frequent or general use to obtain particular results. In theory the general strike is effective, but in practice we are going to find it easier to whip the employers one group at a time rather than as a mass. "

The council voted down the Produce Workers resolution and passed the one defending the "reds." "House Cleaning Proves Failure.." the Times said. After the meeting the Mailers Union withdrew its delegates, charging that the council was "dominated by I.W.W. and other radicals and that the union could not serve the council and the American Federation of Labor at the same time," 18

Federal and local authorities arrested and harassed Socialists and Wobblies. Although the unions did not endorse their programs, they defended the rights of the persecuted radicals. In a Metal Trades Council meeting delegates charged that the Workers, Soldiers and sailors Council had fallen into the hands of wobblies and Bolsheviks. however,, a motion to recall the money subscribed for its support and return it to the locals that raised it died for want of a second,

The Union Record defended the strike in an editorial "Concerning Revolution." Rejecting violence, the paper asserted: "But if by revolution is meant that a Great Change is coming over the face of the world which will transform our method of carrying on in industry, then we do believe in such a Great Change and that our General Strike was one very definite step towards it . . . .

Someday., when the workers have learned to manage, they will BEGIN MANAGING." 19 The General Strike Committee's official history summed up: "The workers went back, most of them not feeling defeated., but feeling quite reasonably successful, glad they had struck., equally glad to call it off., and especially glad to think that their experience would now be of use to the entire labor movement of the country as it makes its plans for the Mooney general strike. ,20

Years later Anna Louise Strong described the strikers as "red in the ranks and yellow as leaders.," asking:

Shall one blame the yellow leaders who sabotaged the strike and wished to end it? . . . But it is more to the point to ask why it happened that as soon as any worker was made a leader he wanted to end the strike. Workers in the ranks felt the thrill of massed power . . . But as soon as one of these workers was put on a responsible committee as he also wished to stop . . . For we lacked all intention of real battle; we expected to drift into power. 21

After the strike ended the Metal Trades and Central labor councils could not keep their promises to protect the jobs of sympathetic strikers. The Master Barbers demanded apologies before taking back their employees. The Master Builders declared for the open hop.. then backed down. City Light disciplined employees who struck by promoting scabs to their jobs., and the City denied all strikers their vacations and gave others additional layoffs.

The union of City Light employees struck. Several employers discriminated against janitors and hotel maids who struck. The Auto Drivers Union complained that Seattle Taxicab and Transfer Company hired nonunion drivers. Bradner and Company blacklisted some members of the Butter, Egg and Produce Workers and the Charles G. Lilly Company locked out members of the Cereal and Flour Mill Workers.

The Teamsters had trouble getting their members back to work at the gas company and Frye Packing Company. The gas company locked out members of the Gas Fitters Union., reduced their wages.. and told them to tear up their union cards. The Gas Workers Union, whose members manufactured the gas, had refused to strike; at this point they voted not to support the pipe fitters. To force the company to take back the fitters the Metal Trades Council discussed and abandoned a plan to shut off the gas in industrial plants where union members worked.

Puget Sound longshoremen had just signed an agreement with their employers in January', the first since their defeat in 1916. Nevertheless., the Seattle local of 3,500 members voted to participate in the general strike. Thereupon the 'Waterfront Employers notified them that if they struck the agreement would be terminated.

Reassured by the Central Labor Councils promise of protection., they joined the strike anyway. The day after the strike began, Seattle employers, including Frank Waterhouse of the waterfront employers., formed the Associated Industries. This organization would spearhead the open-shop movement during the next decade. The longshoremen returned to work open shop selected by employers ":n accordance with their efficiency." 22

They hung onto their work on the docks and battled with their employers for recognition. Finally in August., the Pacific Coast District International Longshoremen's Association signed a closed-shop agreement for Puget Sound.. Columbia River, and British Columbia ports,, providing for wage increases.

The shipyard workers remained on strike after the general strike ended. When the Pacific Coast Metal Trades District Council met in Portland February 17, the delegates endorsed the ongoing strike in the Northwest and resolved to take a referendum vote for coastwide strike April 1. The Seattle shipbuilders announced they would resume operations on February 7 in a move the Metal Trades branded as open shop; ironworkers who returned would be considered strikebreakers.

Charles Piez forbade the yards to open under those conditions and the strike dragged on. The Seattle Metal Trades unions returned to work March 11, with the promise of a conference a week later in Washington., D.C., between shipbuilders, government officials,, and union representatives.

Although the yards were supposed to take the men back "as they had come out, the Union Record reported "...that the men are being hand-picked by the foremen and that those who are known to be active unionists are not selected. The J.F. Duthie yard decreed that shop stewards would be discontinued and shop committees would not take up grievances on working time; the company barred business agents from the yard.

Machinists found themselves locked out when a number of contract shops lengthened the work week from forty-four to forty-eight hours and reduced minimum lay from 90 to 80 cents an hour.

The Washington conference refused to raise Pacific Coast shipyard wages; the old Macy scales would continue in effect until October 1. With the war ended., the goverrment and private shipowners no longer needed more vessels,, Pacific Coast Metal Trades unions voted down the April 1 strike proposal.

Seattle employers gloated over their shipyard workers' rejection of the strike call. The Union Record replied that "radicals" had not agitated for a strikes and "after a seven weeks" strike the wokers here were not financially ready for another test of strength.

Members of the Stationary Engineers, Machinists, and Boilermakers defeated attempts of their internationals to oust local radicals and reelected them to office.

Groping for means to resist the employers' open-shop drive. radical Seattle unionists formed the Federated Unions in May. The organization would assume "authority on economic and industrial questions.." leaving the Central Labor Council "a sort of semi-politics, clearing house for orators and debate.

The preamble declared the object "to promote the general welfare, ensure greater solidarity,, establish a community of interest, and promulgate and affect greater unity in the labor movement.."The Federated Unions aimed to have all agreements expire simultaneously on April 30., to negotiate blanket agreements in all industries, and to establish the shop steward system. With conservatives charging the plan a Wobbly maneuver, the self-styled attempt at unity and solidarity precipitated a divisive debate in the Central Labor Council. By a vote of 100 to 45,, on May 28 the council condemned the Federated Unions as a dual organization, and it disappeared.

Perhaps the returns of the general strike ballot in May indicate in part union people's frame of mind. Nationally, 128,142 members voted to strike., 3.27 percent of the AFL membership. In Seattle 7,171 members voted "yes." 8.05 percent of the membership. The Seattle Boilermakers voted for the strike 3,076 to 1,220. The big Seattle Longshoremen's Union did not even return ballots.

But in Seattle, in unions that voted on the question, a larger percentage voted against it than nationally. The national "yes" vote carried by 83.13 percent of votes cast, the Seattle vote by 73 percent# and the Seattle Boiler-makers by 71.6 percert. Apparently only a small minority,, both nationally and in Seattle, supported the Mooney general strike proposal.

Late in the year Seattle employers defeated the unions in two major industries. The Building Trades and Panting Trades struck the beginning of September for wage increases. After months the internationals called off the strikes and the members returned to woik open shop. In contrast to the 50.,OOO people who marched in the parade in 1918, Seattle unionists celebrated a subdued Labor Day in 1919 with a picnic.

We come back to the question of how to remember the general strike: as a victory, a defeat,, or an adventure. Seattle union people proved that they could "pull a general strike"--that they had the power to shut down the city. Subsequently pride compelled them to defend the action against employer criticism. But they could not translate that power into economic pressure to gain concessions from employers.

They could not muster the focused determination and endurance that would force an individual employer to capitulate in a primary economic strike. The victims of discrimination could not defend themselves, and the rest of the unions had no stomach for more pathetic strikes.

The general strike did nothing for the embattled shipyard workers. Predictably, neither the Metal Trades or Central Labor councils could protect the jobs of sympathetic strikers; employers blacklisted and discriminated with impunity.
Months of acrimonious and devisive debate in the union movement succeeded the tremendous surge of solidarity that shut down the city February 6, Even as they mobilized for the general strike,, union people's economic power diminished.

With the war ended, employers planned to return to normalcy by cutting wages and laying off workers. Although the general strike did not precipitate the open-shop decade that followed., it left the Seattle union movement with weakened defenses during the bitter years to come.

In that rapidly chilling economic climate, prudent resistance might have served working people better than the most flamboyant challenge that the union movement could hurl at the capitalist lass.

Tacoma,, Washington
May 2. 1994

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berner, Richard C. Seattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence to restoration. Seattle: Charles Press., 1991.

DeShazop Melvin G. Radical Tendencies in the Seattle Labor Movement as Reflected in the Proceedings of Its Central Labor Council Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Washington, 1925.

Frank, Dana. Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizings,, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Friedheim, Robert L. The Seattle General Strike. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979.

Industrial Workers of the World. "Strike Bulletin, Shipbuilders Industrial Union No. 325, Seattle, Feb. 1. 191@.

International Weekly (Seattle), Feb. 7. 1919.

International Workers' Defense League. "Record of Votes Cast on Mooney General Strike Ballot, 1919." San Francisco, 1919.

Magden, Ronald E. A History of Seattle Waterfront Workers., 1884-1934. Seattle: International Longshorenen's and Warehousemen's Union Local 19 and Washington Cormission for the Humanities, 1991.

O'Connor, Harvey. Revolution in Seattle. (1964) Seattle: Left Bank Books, 1981.

Perlman, Selig and Philip Taft. History of Labor in the United States, 1896-1932. (1935) New York: Augustus Kelley, 1966. Sale, Roger. Seattle: Past to Present. Seattle: University of Washington Press., 1976.

Seattle General Strike Committee. Strike Bulletin Feb. 7., 1919.

Seattle General Strike Committee. "The Seattle General Strike.," March 1919. Reprinted in Root & Branch., Editor. Root & Branch: The Rise of the Workers' Movements. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications. 197@.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Seattle Star.

Seattle Times.

Seattle Union Record.

Taft, Philip. The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957.

Washington State Bureau of Labor. Eleventh Biennial Report (1917-1918).

Washington State Bureau of Labor.Twelfth Biennial Reprt (1919-1920).

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THE GENERAL STRIKE

Rogert Sale, "The Seattle General Strike," Seattle, past to present. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976, p. 126-
135.

In the fall of 1918 Seattle and the country were hit hard by an influenza epidemic, and by rumors of many kinds. As the first sizable American casualties were reported, so too came stories of "German atrocities." There were rumors of an impending armistice, rumors that the United States might go to war with Russia after defeating Germany.

As part of a propaganda effort there were rumors of labor uprisings in Germany, but it also was said that the "Bolshevik horde" were looming in England, France, Italy, China, the United States. The war was almost over, the American presence in France had been decisive, but everywhere people seemed bitter and weary rather than buoyed or excited.

There was wild cheering when the armistice news arrived in Seattle, but it brought no peace, or harmony. The fight between the " good citizens" and the "reds" was not over; indeed, it had not truly been joined yet. The labor unions, "red" and otherwise, saw that they needed to work immediately to consolidate some wartime gains.

The war gave impetus to Wobblies in many unions to try to revolutionize the A.F. of L. craft union system into their One Big Union, and it also enabled many working-class people to begin to adopt the habits of the bourgeois. The leaders of the Seattle Central Labor Council reflected both impulses. They were home-owning and God-fearing people, sober and Prohibitionist.

But while they were not Wobblies themselves, they were generally sympathetic to them, even though the Wobblies in Seattle tended to be close to what in the revolutionary efforts of the 1960s were student groups: young, ideal istic, transient, short-lived rather than longtime labor people. Ault Duncan, and many Seattle labor people believed in industrial unionism and disagreed with the Wobblies only over how -it was to be achieved.

Their hope and strength lay not in the national A.F. of L. but in a strong local organization that could bring together afl Seattle labor as a united front against any employer or group of employers.

The great weakness of the unions, which they seemed only partly to realize at the time, was that most of their great horde of new members worked in the shipyards, and shipbuilding was almost en- tirely a wartime activity. Since most yards built steel-hulled ships, the Metal Trades Council was the labor power in the yards.

Throughout the war there had been dickering between the shipbuilders, especially Skinner and Eddy, and the Metal Trades Council, and various govemmental boards. In order to insure a steady labor supply, Skinner and Eddy was willing to pay very high wages, and when wages were consequently driven up in other yards, the government became alarmed.

Charles Piez of the federal Emergency Fleet Corporation finally agreed to the inflated wages after the Metal Trades Council guaranteed that there would be no further strikes in the shipyards in wartime. The moment the war ended, the unions ry o get guarantees about peacetime wages. were free to strike to t t
But at that point the govemment and the shipbuilders might welcome a strike as the best means of getting lots of suddenly unwanted
workers off the payroll.

The incident that set the conflict in motion began with a misde- livered telegram. Charles Piez sent a wire to the shipbuilders' employer groupithe Metal Trades Association, telling t@em that if they gave in to union demands, the government would cancel their steel allotment.

But instead of going to the Metal Trades Association the telegram went to the Metal Trades Council, and so the unions learned that Piez had doublecrossed them by outwardly granting a free hand to negotiate after the armistice then threatening employers who negotiated. One version of the story says that the shipbuilders
had the telegram misdelivered so that the unions would vent their anger on Piez and not on them.

Another is that the smaller Seattle shipbuilders got Piez to send the telegram because they could not afford new contracts while Skinner and Eddy could. Another is that Piez was frightened of the power of Seattle's unions. Another claims that the shipbuilders had the telegram misdelivered to get the unions to break the govemment's hold on the shipbuilding industry. Parts of all these explanations could well be true, and all are plausible under the circumstances. In any event, the shipyards were struck on January 21, 1919, when about thirty-five thousand workers walked off the job.

Thus far, with or without the misdelivered telegram, the story, of economic squeeze and labor unrest, seems a familiar one. But some thing happened, not just in the Metal Trades Council, not just among those workers we associate with the left. It was in its way so extraordinary that if we could understand it, we would understand a good deal about Seattle.

At the beginning no one thought of a general strike, and no more than a few people had ever heard the phrase. The idea at first was to strike in sympathy with the shipyard workers because a show of force and solidarity like that surely would be good and helpful.

The more the workers became convinced that the government, or the shipbuilders, or the newspapers, or Mayor Ole Hanson, or all employers were out to crush the power of labor, the more the idea of a general strike seemed attractive. Conversely, the more anyone tried to say just what would be gained by such a strike, the more confused and apprehensive many workers got.

So, when David Skinner, who had been thought friendly to labor because of his high wages, wired Piez in Washington that the strike was the work of "radical leaders whose real desire is to disrupt the whole organization of society," he provided the workers with just the target they needed.

When the local and national press insisted the rank and file did not want to strike, they too offered themselves as a target.lwhen the largest local union in the world, the Boilermakers' Local 104, voted unanimously in favor of the shipyard strike, h@ey gave great impetus to a union of all Seattle labor in a more genera s * . vo e was taken on January 26, and the next day union leaders met to sound out opinion and discovered that many unions, including some of the more conservative ones-the roofers, the cooks, the hotel maids-had already indicated sympathy with the idea of a general strike.

Despite protests from some unions that any breach of an authorized contract violated the principles on which the unions were based, it was agreed that if a majority of the unions voted to have a general strike, then on February 2 a mass meeting would be held to decide what to do next.

In The Seattle General Strike Robert Friedheim describes some of the ensuing events:

Even before the committees could effectively organize themselves, five more Seattle unions reported their members had voted to strike: the structural iron workers, the newsboys, the engineers in the gas plant and the public schools, Carpenters' Local 1335, and Barbers' Local 195. . . . Night after night, as locals held their meetings, votes for a general strike continued to roll in. Electrical Workers'Local 77, Milkman's Local 338, Leather Workers' Local 40, Hotel Maids' Local 528, and the jewelry workers' local all certified officially that their members were willing to strike.

The names of these unions show that this was not in the usual sense a class matter. Some of these unions had been in existence as long as the A.F. of L., and members of the skilled crafts and the small local service unions had no reason to ally themselves with large unions like the Boilermakers, to say nothing of the I.W.W. Of those reporting by January 29, only the gas workers and the federal employees were against the strike.

Of course, all members of all unions were not in favor, but it is surprising that 99 out of 101 unions had majorities in favor. By the time of the February 2 mass meeting the point to be discussed no longer was whether there would be a strike, but how it would take place.

What had happened to produce this great show of sympathy and antagonism? Had there been a referendum on the war sometime in 1918, a considerable majority would have said they were for it, since not to be for the war was to be unpatriotic, disloyal, a traitor. But there was, very obviously, a strong feeling against people in government and especially in industry who seemed to be reaping huge profits in money and power from the war.

There is good evidence that in all the Allied countries, including the United States, many people fought and worked willingly in the war effort though they distrusted and even hated their leaders.
The common people, emerging from the darkness of ages, were suspicious and fearful of people with money and power and, at this point, no moral legislation and no sudden access to the bourgeois class could allay those feelings, and no assurances offered by newspapers or governments or employers could either. We know, furthermore, that what was happening in Seattle was not happening elsewhere, and from that we can draw at least two conclusions.

First, working people in Seattle had not become completely settled or completely cynical and had retained some of the idealism, be it bourgeois or radical, on which so much of the westward expansion of the country had been based. Second, moneyed people in Seattle had lost or had hidden whatever ide alism they had, so they seemed to the workers only to be the enemy.

Anna Louise Strong's is the best account of the meetings of February 2 and after:

The General Strike Committee, composed of more than three hundred delegates from one hundred and ten unions, met all day Sunday, February 2, 1919, They faced and disregarded the national officers of craft unions, who were telegraphing orders from the East. They met the threats of the Seattle Health Department to jail drivers of garbage wagons if garbage was not removed, by agreeing to permit the collection of "wet garbage only" on special permit under the strikers' control. They rejected as strike slogan the motto "We have nothing to lose but our chains and a whole world to win" in favor of "Together We Win." For they reasoned that they had a good deal to lose-jobs at good wages with which they were buying silk shirts, pianos, and homes. They wanted solidarity but not class war. Then so little did they realize the problems before them that they fixed the strike for the following Thursday at 10 A.m. and adjourned to meet on Thursday evening after the strike should have started, meantime referring any new problems that might arise to a rather hastily elected "Committee of Fifteen - "

Strong's jibes at the lunchpail unions with their pianos and silk shirts perhaps shows a little too clearly that she had had such things and had rejected them. It also shows that the strikers were neither transients nor radical nor rabble, and that she shared the enthusiasm, however naive, of the others.

She wrote in an editorial in the Union-Record two days before the strike: "We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country, a move that will lead-No One Knows Where! We do not need hysteria! We need the iron march of labor!" She and many others saw that the strikers could stay united only if they did not try to say where they were heading:
Later when I was arrested, this editorial was one of the counts against me. Its very vagueness saved me. "No one knows where"-the prosecution claimed this threatened anarchy. The defense retorted that it merely admitted the fact that the future is unknown. Neither gave the real essence of those words. They appealed to the faith of the pioneer in inevitable progress; they stirred the passion of the march to the undiscovered West. Yet they carefully avoided battle.

Is the idea of a march to the undiscovered West in 1919 preposterous? Eight years later George Cotterill was still saying the northwest was "the world's outpost of outlook and opportunity, the place of vision and achievement." Thirty, forty, and fifty years after 1919 people still came west, many feeling and saying something very close to what Strong says here.

The strike happened. At 10:00 A.m. Thursday, February 6, the city stopped. No work was done, except for the setting up of food lines, the delivery of drugs to hospitals and milk to babies, the maintenance of electric power-all at the direction of the Committee of Fifteen. No one seems to have expected that the result would be the usual result of inactivity: silence. Workers had been urged to stay home, and so they did.

The streets were occupied only by children and dogs, and it was hard even for them to do much when everything else was silent. There were squabbles about control of the City Light plant, and many outside the labor movement were nervous about what might happen next; but as an initial show of peaceful force, the strike was a total success.

That was as far as anyone had planned. Revolutionaries wanted working people to assume control of the city's manufacture, government, and services; more conservative people felt one show of strength was enough and quickly wanted to get back to work; most seemed simply unclear. They may have thought the employers and the city officials would surrender, though no one planned what to do if they did.

The Committee of Fifteen, with the power of the city in their hands, kept things running smoothly but made no plans, and the Union-Record was not full of ideas about the future. So when the other side moved, the strikers could do little beyond saying they
would or would not cooperate.

Anna Louise Strong's editorial gained wide national circulation and was widely interpreted as a revolutionary document, in which case the strike had to be broken. Mayor Ole Hanson began to see himself as a patriotic strikebreaker. The National Guard was called out, and Hanson said their presence began the stemming of the revolutionary tide. He then said he would declare martial law. As the labor leaders told him, Hanson's moves were fraudulent, designed to interpret the situation falsely to the rest of the country, because the troops were not needed, martial law was not needed, and the number of arrests on February 6 and 7 was two-thirds the normal number.

Hanson, though, felt he had to do something to indicate he was a real tiger, and so on Friday evening he sent this notice to the Committee of Fifteen: "I hereby notify you that unless the sympathy strike is called off by 8 o'clock tomorrow morning, February 8, 1919, I will take advantage of the protection offered this city by the national govemment and operate all the essential services."

This may have gained Hanson the support of business people in Seattle and of Good Citizens elsewhere, but the strikers were not about to be forced into anything, and they refused.

On Saturday afternoon the Committee of Fifteen gave the parent General Strike Committee a resolution denouncing Charles Piez and Ole Hanson, declaring the strike a success, and urging everyone back to work after midnight that night. The leaders seemed inclined to support the resolution, but their rank and file opposed it, and the resolution was rejected that night.

No one worked the following day, Sunday, and by Monday enough cracks had appeared in the solid front to convince the Committee of Fifteen that continuation of the strike could only lead to factions within the movement. On that afternoon it urged everyone to walk off on Monday but to go back to work Tuesday noon. Most of those working on Monday stayed on the job, and by Tuesday all but a few went back to work. The strike was over.

It was hard not to see the strike as a failure. The men had gotten nothing, really, and Ole Hanson had gotten himself onto the lecture circuit as an expert on crushing red revolutions. Strong offers this analysis:

Shall one blame the yellow leaders who sabotaged the strike and wished to end it? Such a charge is easy to make-and true. But it is more to the point to ask why it happened that as soon as any worker was made a leader he wanted to end that strike. A score of times in those five days I saw it happen. Workers in the ranks felt the thrill of massed power which they trusted their leaders to carry to victory.

But as soon as one of these workers was put on a responsible committee, he also wished to stop "before there is riot and blood." The strike could produce no leaders willing to keep it going. All of us were red in the ranks and yellow as leaders. For we lacked all intention of real battle; we expected to drift into power. We loved the emotion of a better world coming, but all of our leaders and not a few of the rank and file had much to lose in the old world. The general strike put into our hands the organized life of the city-all except the guns. We could last only until they started shooting; we were one gigantic bluff. That expert in bluffing, Ole Hanson, saw this on the second day of the struggle.

Strong's instincts surely are the right ones. The strike didn't go on because the leaders did not know where to take it and began to fear the outcome. Ole Hanson could prove that "Together We Win" and "No One Knows Where" were shams as political gestures simply by waiting the strikers out, bluffing on his part, and watching the strike collapse.

It is important for us, however, not simply to see Strong's analysis as the last word or the slogans as political gestures. When Strong says the workers were red in the ranks but yellow as leaders, she is only saying that people like Harry Ault and James Duncan did not feel in need of revolution.

They had a stake in the labor movement, but they also had a stake in Seattle, which was their home as well as where they had come to power and had seen labor become stronger than anywhere else in the country. That did not abate their rage against Ole Hanson or David Skinner or Charles Piez, but it had to shape their vision of what they had, what they might lose.

Many of labor's best leaders had come to power under the unreal conditions of the war. Harry Ault had in 1917 achieved his long-time dream of editing a labor daily mostly because the great increase in the labor force had inflated his circulation. But the achievement of the dream itself had to make him cautious. The war had produced villains for many workers in the form of their employers making huge profits, but it had also given the workers themselves power to fight.

The more the worker won, the more he had to lose; the more that Seattle was his home, the more cautious he became when made a leader. Nothing shows the way Seattle became simultaneously radical and bourgeois more clearly than the success and failure of the General Strike.

For it was a success. Compared to the outcries of the newspapers, the hysteria of many Good Citizens, and the opportunism of Ole
Hanson, the strikers were wonderful: practical, decent, idealistic, scrupulously democratic, able for a moment at least to harmonize the huge energies of a great variety of people.

In that moment the natural pettiness to which flesh is heir, the self-seeking that a fragmented craft union system builds into itself, the anger and disillusion that were exacerbated by the war were abrogated. But it was a local success, and was short-lived because the very ingredients that went into making it happen in the first place contributed to its demise the moment it became clear that very few people wanted a revolution.

Too many had too much to lose in the old Seattle, and they got into more than they had really bargained for. it was a show of hope and desire, not the first step in a revolution, and the conditions that had made the hope possible were already passing as they became articulated in the strike.

So it was a failure too. A year later, Lincoln Steffens came to Seattle, and Anna Louise Strong told him of all the disasters that had overtaken the strikers:

Its been getting worse for months," I answered. "The Central Labor Council meetings that used to have such fine speeches from workers all over the world have turned into nasty wrangles between carpenters and plumbers for control of little jobs. I think it began when the shipyards closed and the metal trades workers began to leave.

Those workers' enterprises of which we were so proud began to go to pieces. And everyone who took part in them got blamed. Now some of the members of our staff are attacking Harry Ault, our editor, most horribly; one of them said that if I didn't join the attack, they would 'rub my name in the dirt.' it was a man
I used to like who threatened me."

"So you are siding with Harry?" Steffens asked.

"Well, no, I can't exactly side with Harry." Under the questions I began to analyze. "I think it's terrible the way our paper is going. We are beginning to be bossed by advertisers. When the labor movement was united business firms had to advertise in our paper. But now they come creeping up on us and make us soften our tone.

"Harry is between the devil and the deep sea. I think he's not bold enough; he ought to defy those advertisers even if we have to have a smaller paper. But the paper is his child; he dreamed of it when he used to work as a small boy in a printing office and sleep on the table at night. He gave his best years tO make this paper; I hate to see these upstarts call him traitor. But I can't agree with Harry either; he's begun to say the workers are ungrateful. one can't say that."

Under circumstances as sad and crushing as that, Steffens told Strong, she had no choice but to leave, to go to Moscow. Which she did, launched on a strange and grand career that would end with her being one of the few westerners to gain and keep the admiration of Mao Tse-tung.

But for Harry Ault, and for thousands of others like him, leaving was not what they wanted. Seattle was where they lived, where they had achieved at least a small measure of their dreams, where they had to stay and watch those dreams crumble. Robert Friedheim in The Seattle General Strike concludes that "in the days ahead they were to learn that it was worse than a failure-it was a disaster."

Clearly, for many, it was that. But Friedheim implies that the strike might have been a different kind of success from the success it was, and that the subsequent fragmentation of the labor movement would not have happened had the strike never taken place. The implications are false. The war gave the radicals and the labor movement as a whole some rather unreal hopes, and it also gave many of them a home.

Strong loved it when people coming in from outside made great speeches to the Central Labor Council. But those making the speeches either went or stayed, and if they stayed, the less revolutionary they became, just as, when the wartime boom was over, the less powerful they became. Both the radicals and the whole labor movement had to begin to find out all over again what their resources were, and had to live with the bitter knowledge that they were fewer than they had thought.

For the opportunity, the real opportunity, had been mostly lost well before the end of the war, and the strike was really only a sign that some were able to respond to the resultant dangers bravely, if briefly. There was talk in some of the newspapers near the end of the war about a postwar boom in shipbuilding, but that turned out to be overoptimistic.

The coming of the war had delayed the arrival of the diminished and more rigid Seattle economy, but when the war was over, the trouble was rudely exposed for everyone to see. Whatever might have happened after the strike, the fact of a general economic slump speeded up the time when the carpenters would quarrel with the plumbers for control of the little jobs, because Seattle was suffering from a national slump very much as Tacoma did from the 1893 panic, and it was in 1919 powerless, as Tacoma had been then.

As for the radicals, many of them left. Quite interestingly, those who stayed did not become restless again as their bitterness increased, but they stayed as if to savor the taste of that bitterness. Harvey O'Connor in Revolution in Seattle describes, though unfortunately not in great detail, the later lives of people who had been here during the heyday of Socialist and radical thought and work, who saw the strike, the collapse of labor, the rise of Dave Beck, and the coming of the New Deal, which they saw as a mere palliative.

They neither left, like Anna Louise Strong, nor became assimilated into the bourgeois working class; over fifty years later, they could keep the old dream alive, hating the Boeing Company with the same passion as they hated Skinner or Weyerhaeuser or Stone and Webster in the old days. How many there are is impossible to determine, though enough so that most long-time natives of Seattle know one or two or many.

Whatever we write of the history of Seattle after this first crisis, we must try to account for the curious fact that so many who seem to hate it so much do not leave.

In 1919 one famous man visited Seattle, and another who had not yet achieved his fame returned home to it after his wartime hitch in the navy. The visitor was Woodrow Wilson making his whirlwind tour in an effort to gain support for the League of Nations, coming to Seattle shortly after his paralyzing stroke. John Dos Passos fantasizes a small picture of the reception Wilson received:

"...in Seattle the wobblies whose leaders were in I . ail, in Seattle the wobblies whose leaders had been lynched, who'd been shot down like dogs, in Seattle the wobblies lined four blocks and when Wilson passed, stood silent with their arms folded, staring at the great liberal as he was hurried past in his car, huddled in his overcoat, haggard with fatigue, one side of his face twitching.

"The men in overalls, the workingstiffs let him pass in silence after all the other blocks of handclapping and patriotic cheers."

Resolute, righteous, in some respects right, faces turned to the past, the Wobblies died, crushed as much by the ensuing peace as by the previous war. That was one Seattle in 1919, a city that had lost more than the Wobblies ever realized.

The other Seattle was the one seen by Dave Beck when he came home and observed what Wilson had seen: anarchy, idealism, disillusion. Murray Morgan writes: "Beck thought the strike had been wrong, criminally wrong; it had been impetuous, it had been pointless; it brought disrepute to Labor and had won nothing. He was disgusted with the idealists who had dreamed it up.

He would no longer answer when the Wobblies greeted him as a'fellow worker.' " Resolute, righteous, in some respects right, face turned to the future, Beck went back to driving truck, soliciting business for his boss, organizing the laundry teamsters. That was another Seattle in 1919. Its crisis past, it could not tolerate the Wobblies, and was ready for the ministrations of Dave Beck.

Rogert Sale, "The Seattle General Strike," Seattle, past to present. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976, p. 126- 135.

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THE SEATTLE GENERAL STRIKE.

Murray C. Morgan, "The Seattle General Strike," Skid Road, an informal portrait of Seattle. New York: The Viking Press, 1960. p. 199-219.

A general strike, by dictionary definition, is a strike in all industries of a locality or nation, generally in sympathy for a smaller group of workers. Theoretically it brings about complete cessation of business.

The first strike in the United States to meet that definition took place in Seattle. It began at ten a.m. on Thursday, February 6, 1919 and lasted until February 11. Sixty thousand workers went off their jobs, and they did bring about an almost complete cessation of business.

When the strike ended no one was sure where it had led, but the effects were far-reaching. The strike led the mayor of Seattle to dream of becoming President of the United States; it started a young Seattle woman, Anna Louise Strong, who had been a member of the school board, along a path that led her to Moscow-and back; it gave impetus to a series of Justice Department raids in which young J. Edgar Hoover first showed aptitude in rounding up radicals; it frightened millions of Americans into believing that revolution was just around the comer, and it cheered thousands with the same thought; it gave labor a sense of power and a sense of frustration; it disillusioned a young truck driver named Dave Beck.

The general strike influenced the thinking of a generation in Seattle. It framed the world in which they lived.

The strike started in the shipyards. Seattle's shipbuilding industry had expanded enormously during the war. Though the fighting had ended, the war was not legally over and a Shipbuilding Adjustment Board-established by agreement among the United States Shipping Board, the Navy, and the presidents of the shipbuilding crafts-still supervised the shipyards.

Shortly after the German surrender, the Shipbuilding Adjustment Board announced a new, uniform, nationwide wage scale. Western workers were outraged. The cost of living was "slightly higher west of the Rockies" and previous agreements had allowed them higher wages than in Eastern yards. They appealed to the board for a revised scale, and they asked the shipyard owners directly for higher wages and shorter hours. They asked $8 a day for skilled workers, $5.50 for unskilled workers, and a 44-hour week. Their demands were turned down.

Feeling among the workers ran high, especially after they learned -through the delivery of a telegram, intended for the employers' Metal Trade Association, to the workers' Metal Trades Council that the employers were willing to raise wages but were threatened with cancellation of their government contracts and loss of steel priorities if they raised the scale without the board's permission.

The Seattle Metal Trades Council called for a strike vote among its seventeen member unions. The delegates from one of the unions voted against the strike; six unions voted for it but not by the majority required in their constitutions; ten approved without qualification. So by a vote of 10 to 7 the strike was approved. On January 21, 35,000 workers walked out.

The next day the Metal Trades Council asked the Seattle Central Labor Council to call its members out in sympathy. The council put it up to the individual unions. Most of the local union leaders were against the strike. The national policy of the American Federation of Labor was against the use of the strike as a political protest.

Many locals had good agreements which they would jeopardize if they went out, and the national headquarters of the unions were solidly opposed to "political adventuring." But many local labor leaders were in Chicago attending a rally for the release of Tom Mooney, and in their absence, the rank and file voted. In union after union they voted for a strike.

The carpenters, perhaps the most conservative of all unions, voted to strike. So did the typographers. So did the musicians and the longshoremen, the stage hands and the mill worker's, the hotel maids and the teamsters. One after another, a hundred and ten unions voted to strike. The Wobblies were not represented on the Central Labor Council, but they sent delegates to applaud the strike votes; the Japanese unions, kept off the council by racial restrictions, sent delegates to say they'd strike too.

A general strike was approved overwhelmingly, but no one knew how to run one. It was one thing to walk off the job at some plant and try to keep strike-breakers from walking in. It was altogether different to stop the industrial life of a city Of 300,000- It had never been done in America. No one was sure how to go about it.

A General Strike Committee was formed. It was made up of three delegates from each striking union, plus three from the Central Labor Council. The committee, with more than three hundred members, was too large to function. Its first meeting, on Sunday, February 2., lasted all day. After sixteen hours of uninterrupted talk, the committee delegated power to an executive committee, known as the Committee of Fifteen, and adjourned until Thursday evening-the night after the strike was to start. The Committee of Fifteen became the center of power in Seattle. It decided who would work after Thursday and who wouldn't. Here is a list of typical requests received by the committee and recorded by the strike historian:

King County Commissioners ask for janitors for City-County Building. Refused.

F. A. Rust asks for janitors for the Labor Temple. Refused.
Cooperative Market asks for janitors because of the food they handle for strike kitchens. Granted.

Teamsters Union asks permission to carry oil for Swedish hospital. Approved.

Retail Drug Clerks ask for instructions in view of medical needs of city. Referred to public welfare committee which decides that certain prescription counters remain open, but the drugstores are not to sell any other merchandise.

Telephone girls requested to stay on the job temporarily.

Longshoremen ask permission to handle government mails, customs, and baggage. Permit given for mails and customs but not for baggage. Plumbers Union given permit to keep seven plumbers on duty for emergency calls. Streetcar workers given permission to appoint six watchmen to safeguard car barns.

C.R. Case, chief of street department, and backed by mayor, requests that street lighting be allowed "to check hooliganism and riots." Confused discussion over this due to the technical difficulty of separating light from power: City Light finally allowed to run.

Robert Bridges, who was elected to presidency of the public port by votes of progressive workers, appeals on behalf of farm products in cold storage, saying, "The big companies store in private warehouses, getting power from Seattle Electric which your strike cannot touch. Do not ruin the small farmers, who store in the public warehouses with power from City Light." This also influences retention of City Light in full operation.

There were hundreds of details for the Committee of Fifteen to arrange. They made sure there would be milk for children and for the hospitals, that the hospitals could get laundry, that water pressure would be kept up. They set up strike kitchens and arranged for food to be supplied; anyone could buy a meal, but strikers got cut rates.

They set up an auxiliary police force of "labor guards" to help the city police. All this they did with considerable foresight, but one thing they did not do: they did not state their aims. They did not state them because they did not know them. They were not sure how long the strike was to last, whether it was merely a gesture of solidarity with the shipyard workers, whether it was a move toward educating the workers in the problems of running a city, whether it was an attempt to touch off a nationwide general strike.

No one knew whether the gun was loaded.

But at ten a.m., Thursday, February 6, exactly on schedule, America's first general strike started.

Mayor Ole Hanson was a friend of labor. He said so himself, loud and often. When the strike was first called he asked some of the labor leaders to lunch and over coffee he said, "Boys, I want my street lights and water supply and hospitals. I don't care if you shut down all the rest of the city."

He got his street lights and water supply and hospitals; he got many other services designed to prevent hardship, and he also got a chance to make a national name for himself. As a friendly reporter once said of him, "There are really two Ole Hansons-the one who talks and the one who acts; as a talker he is often erratically radical, but his actions are always rational." That was correct.

Holy Ole, as his foes called him, might look like a political whirling dervish as he spun from the Republicans to the Progressives to Wilson and back to the Republicans, but he kept his eye on the ball. He had been in Seattle sixteen years when the general strike started, and by any standards he had done well for himself.

Ole was a small man with red hair parted just a little left of center and a high voice that seemed tinged with hysteria when he made a public speech. "He just seemed to be wound up too tight," a political associate of Hanson's said years later. "I never heard anything like Old Ole until Hitler came along. He'd get so worked up he'd be almost screaming. He sure sounded sincere." He had great vitality and an ambition that almost tore him apart; if he ever doubted that he was on the way to political success he did not show his doubts.

There is no question about his courage.

Hanson was working in Butte, Montana, in 1900 when he injured his spine; doctors doubted that he would ever walk again. But Ole's hero was Teddy Roosevelt, and Roosevelt had conquered illness by exercise. Hanson bought an old covered wagon and rigged up a combination harness and sling, which he fastened to the rear ofthe wagon; it enabled him to walk behind the prairie schooner. With his wife driving the wagon Hanson trudged along behind. He walked the seven hundred miles from Butte to Seattle and reached the Sound country physically fit. When Hanson and his family camped their first night on Beacon Hill and looked down on the lights of the Skid Road and the business district, Ole made his first political speech. He later recalled telling the idlers who had gathered to inspect his covered wagon that he would be mayor of Seattle some day. But first there was the problem of earning a living. He bought a grocery on Beacon Hill, sold it "after learning that the grocer is the king of philanthropists," went into the insurance business and left it when a real estate man told him that no insurance agent in Seattle owned his own home. The real-estate man owned his house, so Ole became a real-estate agent.

As a dealer in property, Hanson never eclipsed the big holders but he did well enough to be able to turn his talents to politics. He was a reformer and he found his first issue in race-track gambling.
The Seattle race track had been getting a bad press. An embezzler had gambled away a firm's funds there; a young man killed himself after losing his inheritance; the track was a hangout for gamblers and pimps and hoodlums. Hanson picked the track as his private political issue, ran for the state legislature on a "Ban Race-track Gambling" platform, and won. It was proof of Holy Ole's energy that as a freshman representative he was able to have his anti-racetrack bill the first one in the legislative hopper and the first major law to be passed.

Hanson ran first as a Republican. He worshiped Teddy Roosevelt and named his second son for him. (It was a Seattle joke that Hanson named his six boys after the men he most admired, in de- clining order: Ole Hanson, Jr., Theodore Roosevelt Hanson, William Taft Hanson, Eugene Field Hanson-after the poet and columnist-Bob La Follette Hanson, Lloyd George Hanson.) He "moosed it"-his own expression-with Teddy, then swung to Wilson in 1916 because "he kept us out of war."

But once the United States declared war on the Central Powers, Hanson became a home-front belligerent. In 1918 he told the voters with a straight face that he was running for mayor as "a patriotic duty." Ole junior was old enough for the army but not healthy enough, and Hanson imagined he could hear his own parents saying, "Our country is at war. Others are going to the front, but you can serve at home. Do your duty."

The voters also did their duty as Hanson saw it. They elected him mayor to succeed Hi Gill, and on the March day that Hanson was elected mayor, the first female member of Seattle's school board was recalled. The issue was pacifism and radicalism.

Even more than Hanson, Anna Louise Strong was a newcomer to Seattle. A handsome woman in her early thirties, she was of pre- Revolutionary stock on both sides of her family. She had been graduated from Bryn Mawr and had taken graduate work at Oberlin and her Ph.D. at Chicago. After a brief term as assistant editor of a Fundamentalist weekly and a period recovering from a nervous breakdown brought about by her love for a married man, she organized a venture known as the "Know Your City" Institute -a type of exhibition dedicated to telling Western newcomers about their communities.

From that she moved to child-welfare exhibits in various cities, only to have more skillful promoters organize her out of a job. She worked for a while with the United States Children's Bureau, then in 1916 came to Seattle to make a home for her widowed father, a minister, who had moved west from Nebraska some years before.

Actually she spent little time making a home. She was a passion- ate mountain climber and organized cooperative summer camps in the Cascades. She led the first winter climb of Mount Hood. She guided parties across the glaciers on Mount Rainier. She quickly attracted the attention of Seattle, and less than a year after she came to town she was prevailed upon to run for the school board.

She was a natural: the only woman candidate, the only
candidate with a Ph.D., the only candidate to have published a book (she'd written a play, a novel, and a book of poems), the only candidate with practical experience in education. Labor was for her-her father was a progressive; the Municipal League, which was then a liberal organization, and the Commercial Club, a lively group of small businessmen who had organized in opposition to the Chamber of Commerce, both endorsed her. Women were for her, and she won easily.

Once on the board, however, she found there was little she could do. Her concern was with the theory of education; board meetings took up such practical matters as plumbing fixtures. She found her official duties "the most completely boring of my life." She was not bored long.

The year of her election was the year of the Everett troubles. The AFL Shingle weavers were on strike in Everett, thirty miles north of Seattle, and the IWW was supporting them. Late in August the Everett police rounded up the Shingle weaver pickets, took them to a narrow trestle, and beat them up. The next day there was a riot in which the police routed the strikers. The Wobblies decided to reinforce the Shingle weavers (who had not asked for their support) with a free-speech demonstration.

It was a Wob political tactic to send so many soap boxers into towns that restricted free speech that the jails couldn't handle the crowd; but this time the demonstrators, forty-one of them, were arrested, taken to the city limits, and made to run a gantlet of deputies armed with clubs and slug-shots. A week later the Wobblies tried again.
They chartered two Seattle boats, the Verona and the Calista, and on Sunday, November 5, 1916 280 demonstrators sailed for Everett. Pinkerton agents in Seattle wired that they were coming. When the Verona tied up at the Everett dock, the sheriff and 200 deputies were waiting. The sheriff asked the Wobs to point out their leaders. They refused.

Somebody started shooting. Before the Verona cast off and moved away, five of the demonstrators and two of the vigilantes were dead, thirty-one demonstrators and nineteen vigilantes wounded. When the two ships got back to Seattle, everyone on board was arrested .2 Seventy-four were charged with murder.

On March 5, 1917, the first of the defendants, Thomas Tracy, was put on trial for his life. Anna Louise Strong covered the trial for the New York Post, and the testimony she heard changed her life.

Years later she summarized her dispatches by saying, "The news was that at every stage the Everett police and private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking in the streets. The lumber guards on the dock had begun the shooting and continued firing as the Verona pulled away; yet none of them was arrested. The men on trial for murder were not indi- vidually shown to have even possessed a gun; it was enough that someone on their ship, a comrade or agent provocateur, had fired."

Tracy was acquitted. Judge Ronald dismissed the charges against the other seventy-three defendants.

Anna Louise Strong came to have deep sympathy for the Wobblies as she listened to the trial. She thought of them as "direct in- heritors of the fighting pioneer," who were "engaged in the struggle of men once free and expecting freedom but now slowly, inexplicably, irretrievably enslaved . . . waging a stark, bloody fight for elementary human rights."

Her growing partisanship for the tough "class warriors" of the Skid Road merged with another new cause that had come to dominate her thinking: pacifism. The agitation for American entry into the war horrified her. Her father was a religious pacifist; she shared his moral scruples about killing and to them added her economic conviction that war was merely a way of making the rich richer and the poor dead. She joined every group she heard of that opposed American participation.

She fought conscription, believing it to be a device for forcing the poor to fight the battles of the rich. When the United States finally did go in, she felt that the country she knew and loved was dead. She ran away to the mountains. There, after a summer of brooding nights and days of desperate climbing, she came across some copies of a small Socialist weekly, the Seattle Call. Its anti-war sentiments were her sentiments. She rushed back to Seattle and became a reporter for the paper. As a Socialist propagandist she worked herself to the point of exhaustion. But the paper was small and almost no one noticed that the female member of the school board was preaching pacifism in a radical weekly. It was not until Hulet Wells, a Socialist and the former president of the Central Labor Council, was put on trial for obstructing the war effort that Miss Strong's political position attracted citywide attention.

Even then she might have avoided trouble had she been so minded. The principle charge against Wells was that he had circulated an anti-conscription leaflet. Professional witnesses appeared against him to swear it was paid for by German gold. Miss Strong went to the defense attorney, George Vanderveer, an able man who had abandoned a lucrative private practice to defend left-wing causes.

She told him that as secretary of the group that had originally sponsored the leaflet she could name the prominent Seattle people who had subscribed to its sentiments and who had contributed funds for its publication. To do this would make her many enemies among the people who had changed their views; it would also expose her as an ally of the far Left. But her testimony would be valuable because she was "the best known of the respectable women in town."

Vanderveer realized how much she had to lose. "Young lady," he told her, "my advice to you personally is that you need a guardian to keep you out of this. But my statement as an attorney for the defense is that you offer us our best chance of winning." She testified. The best the defense could get was a hung jury. Wells was tried again and convicted. A recall petition was started against Anna Louise Strong.

It languished at first but gained impetus when she sat beside an anarchist friend, Louise Olivereau, during her trial on the charge that she had sent anti-war leaflets to soldiers. Miss Olivereau, a clerk-typist for the Wobblies, refused to defend herself. She was convicted and the school-board member stood convicted of being her friend.

The recall petitions quickly got enough signatures to put her name on the March ballot. Supporting the recall were most of the middle-class groups that had originally backed her: the Parent-Teachers' Association, the University Women's Club, the Municipal League.

Opposing it was a new alignment in Seattle politics, an alliance of organized labor as represented by the Central Labor Council, the depressed population of the Skid Road as represented by the Wobblies, and a sprinkling of maverick intellectuals. This alliance, the clearest political grouping along class lines since the heyday of Mary Kenworthy, was not enough to defeat the recall; but the "viper in the bosom of the school board" was scotched by a slim 2000-vote margin out of a total of 80,000.

She was soon out of another job. A mob raided the shop where the Call was printed and broke up the press. The paper suspended publication, but its place was taken by the Union Record, a daily, supported cooperatively by a group of unions.

Anna Louise Strong became an editor for the new paper. In January 1919 she went with the Central Labor Council delegation to cover the Chicago labor rally on behalf of Tom Mooney, and she shared the surprise of the Seattle delegates when they learned by telegram that the general strike was called. She hurried back to Seattle to work for its success.

Like almost everyone who supported the strike, she didn't know what it was intended to accomplish. Two days before the strike she wrote an editorial in the Union Record saying so. It became the most quoted editorial in Seattle's newspaper history:

THURSDAY AT 10 A.M.

There will be many cheering, and there will be some who fear. Both these emotions are useful, but not too much of either. We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by Labor in this country, a move which will lead

NO ONE KNOWS WHERE

LABOR WILL FEED THE PEOPLE

Twelve great kitchens have been offered, and from them food will be distributed by the provision trades at low cost to all.

LABOR WILL CARE FOR THE BABIES AND THE SICK

The milk-wagon drivers and the laundry drivers are arranging plans for supplying milk to the babies, invalids, and hospitals, and taking care of the cleaning of linen for hospitals.

LABOR WILL PRESERVE ORDER

The strike committee is arranging for guards and it is expected that the stopping of the cars will keep people at home.
. . .
A few hot-headed enthusiasts have complained that strikers only should be fed, and the general public left to endure severe discomfort. Aside from the inhumanitarian character of such suggestions, let them get this straight: NOT THE WITHDRAWAL OF LABOR POWER, BUT THE POWER OF THE WORKERS TO MANAGE WILL WIN THIS STRIKE.

. . .

The closing down of Seattle's industries, as a mere shutdown, will not affect the great Eastern combinations of capitalists much. They could let the whole Northwest go to pieces as far as money alone is concerned.

But, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the workers organize to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order-this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of power by the workers.

Labor will not only shut down the industries, but Labor will reopen, under the management of the appropriate trades, such activities as are needed to preserve public health and public peace. if the strike continues, Labor may feel led to avoid public suffering by reopening more and more activities,

UNDER ITS OWN MANAGEMENT

And this is why we say we are starting on a road that leads-

NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!

At ten o'clock Thursday morning whistles sounded in the mills and on the ships at the docks. With that signal the industrial activity of the city came to a halt. Streetcar service stopped. Schools let out. Banks locked their doors. Restaurants shut down.

The movies closed. Presses and linotypes went silent and lead cooled in the pots. Clerks left the groceries, the dry goods stores, the markets. Elevator boys shut the gates of their lifts. Maids stopped making the hotel beds. From Georgetown to Ballard things quieted down.

That was the greatest surprise of all-the quiet. The whines of the saws, the clatter of streetcars and trucks, the honk of taxi horns, the creak of the winches, the shouts of newsboys, the pecking of typewriters, the rattle of elevator chains-all were silenced. People suddenly heard the chirp of sparrows and the moaning of the doves that nested in downtown buildings. It was so quiet, a striker remarked, you could hear the grass grow; it was so quiet that people were unnerved.

Many people had expected riot, even revolution. The night before the strike Mayor Hanson sat in his bedroom in his new fourteen-room house and worked on "plans for defense, including securing cartridges, shot guns and machine guns, and drawing a map showing the places where men were to be stationed, and massing our forces at what I considered strategic points." At dawn that morning a convoy of trucks had rumbled in from Camp Lewis with fifteen hundred soldiers aboard; they were stationed at the armory, alert for trouble. There was no trouble.

After the ten o'clock whistle sounded merchants and lawyers and tradesmen and workers stood anxiously in front of their shops
and offices, waiting for what was to come. The minutes stretched into hours and nothing happened. A hearse rolled slowly down the street, carrying a placard which read, "Exempted by the Strike Committee." An occasional laundry wagon or private car appeared, and there was a clatter of hoofs on the red-brick streets as a few farsighted commuters rode home on horseback.

Heavily armed policemen stood at the street corners, passing jokes with people they knew. Labor guards, wearing arm bands but vested with no real authority, patrolled the industrial district; whenever a crowd gathered, they asked the members to "break it up, fellows" or mentioned that it was a fine day to be home planting potatoes. Late in the afternoon the streets were almost deserted.

In the quiet rumors spread. There were no papers and, of course, no radio. One rumor was as believable as the next. The word spread that Mayor Hanson had been assassinated, that the Army was driving the strikers back to work at the points of bayonets, that the strike was spreading across the country, that the workers had announced the confiscation of private property, that the power company's dam had been dynamited, that the Central Labor Temple had been dynamited, that on the far side of town the water supply had been cut and firebugs were at work, that the water system had been poisoned, that homes on the outskirts were being pillaged, that the strike leaders had been shot, that the strike leaders had set up a soviet. As night fell the police station switchboard was flooded with calls from women pleading for protection.

The night passed without incident and the second day started as quietly as the first. But there was a difference: the fear of the unknown was past. This was a situation, a thing within bounds; it could be understood and managed.

Probably the first man to understand the implications of the orderly first day was Ole Hanson; he must have seen that there wasn't going to be violence, that the strikers did not intend to seize property. He must have understood something the strikers had not even admitted to themselves: that the general strike was not a means to an end but an end in itself.

There was nothing concrete the strikers could achieve. The ship- yard operators could out wait them; the strike might show sympathy but it would not win raises for the men in the shipyards. Nothing else could be done without violence, and the labor leaders had no stomach for bloodshed; even if they had wanted to seize the factories, they had no arms. All the strikers could do, sooner or later, was go back to work.

In a way Hanson smashed the strike. He smashed it every day for four days in stories he gave to the local United Press bureau, which in turn gave them nationwide play. He exorcised the strike as "a treasonable Bolshevist uprising," and when the strike died a non-violent death after five days, he went into business as the Savior of Seattle, the Suppressor of Red Rebellion.

His actual contribution to the end of the strike was a "Proclama- tion to the People of Seattle" and an "Ultimatum to the Executive Strike Committee." The proclamation, written on the second day of the strike, said:

By virtue of the authority vested in me as mayor, I hereby guarantee to all the people of Seattle absolute and complete protection. They should go about their daily work and business in perfect security. We have fifteen hundred policemen, fifteen hundred regular soldiers from Camp Lewis, and can and will secure, ff necessary, every soldier in the Northwest to protect life, business and property.

The time has come for every person in Seattle to show his Americanism. Go about your daily duties without fear. We will see to it that you have food, transportation, water, light, gas and all necessities. The anarchists in this community shall not rule its affairs. All persons violating the laws will be dealt with summarily.

OLE HANSON, Mayor

The ultimatum was a warning to the strikers that if the strike was not called off at once the mayor would "operate all essential industries." Hanson sent his secretary to the Labor Temple to read aloud the ultimatum and the proclamation.

During the recitation, Hanson declared, "the faces of the very men who had been loudest in egging on the workers turned pale, for they knew we were prepared to go the full limit in defeating their nefarious and un American aims." The strikers' version is that they thought Hanson's ultimatum was just another publicity puff from a blow-hard politician.

Either way, the strike was in trouble.

Its very success worked against it: the town was so quiet, there was so little activity, that the strikers lost their feeling of unity. There was nothing doing. There were no martyrs. No pickets had been beaten up. Nobody had been arrested. It was hard to stay angry. In the absence of specific strike aims the men soon wearied of the Iron March of Labor to "No One Knew Where." They had shown they could shut the town down tight. Now they wanted to get back to work and draw some pay.

The international officials of the unions wanted them back on the job too. Men from national headquarters began arriving the day the strike started; every train brought more; they all agreed that the strike was a mistake, that it jeopardized contracts that had been hard to get. On the third day, the Committee of Fifteen, by a vote of 13 to 1 recommended to the General Strike Committee that the strike be called off. The parent group voted down the recommendation, but the backbone of the strike was broken. The strikers learned of the dissension in the ranks of their leaders.

On the fourth day a number of unions failed to answer the roll call at the Labor Temple; their members were back on the job. Streetcars were running; beds were being made; presses were rolling. Hastily the General Strike Committee drafted a request to all the workers that they should form ranks again for one final day; after that everyone would go back to work.

Some unions agreed, others stayed on the job. The strike petered out. On Wednesday, February 12, Lincoln's Birthday, the first general strike in America was over. Ole Hanson celebrated his victory at a desk heaped with flowers, telegrams, and photographer's proofs.

The flowers and telegrams had come from all over the United States. The proofs were from Seattle. Ole had gone out the day before and had the photographs taken. Now he was trying to pick out the best two. It was a serious business. He was going to have a hundred prints made of each and send them to newspapers all over the country so that everyone could see the man who had put down the traitorous bolshevist rebellion and saved America.

A reporter for a national magazine found him studying the pictures. Ole was frankly delighted about the publicity he was getting. "I guess you've got to grab it when it comes along," he said. "I'm a great man. I win. In six months I lose and it's all over -till the next time. I thought I had a mighty good labor record in the Legislature but Labor fought me when I ran for mayor. I told 'em that in six months they'd say I was the best mayor they ever had, and sure enough they came around and made me an honorary member of their biggest union, and gave me a membership card engraved on silver.

"Now they're giving me hell again. But that's just the regular thing in public life if you're doing anything. Every six months you have a different crowd of followers. This particular time it's about ninety-five per cent. But that doesn't fool me. I'm taking whatever fame there is in it for me right now."

There was plenty of fame. Four national magazines wrote him up. He was on every front page for two or three days. Finally he was asked to go on a lecture tour, an offer that was too good to turn down-all that money, all those audiences, and the Republican nominating convention only a year away.

Ole resigned as mayor of Seattle and toured the country, explaining how the "loathsome monster of anarchy had roamed the streets of my fair city" and how he had saved the day. He wrote a book about it too, Americanism versus Bolshevism, and it went on sale a few months before the presidential nominations were made. The Republicans chose Harding. Hanson returned to Seattle, sold his property, and moved to California.

Anna Louise Strong was assigned by the Central Labor Council
to write a history of the strike. She was at her desk in her father's house one afternoon not long after the men had gone back to work when the telephone rang. Harry Ault, the editor of the Union Record, was calling. "A deputy is here in the office to arrest us," he said. "You'd better hurry down and get it over."

She took a taxi to the Labor Temple, where a deputy handed her an indictment charging her with sedition. The charge was based on her editorials in the Union Record, especially the "No One Knows Where" editorial. She signed the receipt for the indictment and went to the district attorney's office to wait while the Boiler- makers Union rushed to the bank to get her bail.

The arrest of the Record editors, Labor charged, was primarily a political move. Ole Hanson was propagandizing against the na- tional administration, charging it with softness toward anarchists. "We have had enough of weakness, conciliation, and pandering," Ole thundered. "We must run the United States of America primarily for the United States of America. America First!"

There was a crack-down on the strike leaders. But politics cuts both ways. A local Democrat hurried back to Washington to explain in anguish, "My God, those folks are backed by forty thousand votes, the votes that changed to Roosevelt and then to Wilson. Do you want to lose them all to the Farmer-Labor Party?" The case against the editors was quietly dropped.

It had not been a strong case at best. Of ll the editorials "in- citing to anarchy" that the Record had printed, Miss Strong's were the best known. Ole Hanson had quoted her "No One Knows Where" editorial time and again, always implying that the phrase "No One Knows Where" really meant "Straight to Moscow."

Against the background of a city on strike, with the workers actually feeding and policing the people, Hanson's interpretation had emotional conviction, but in a courtroom the editorial had a different sound. It advocated nothing. It was unconsciously or unconscionably clever in the way it avoided threats.

It said, "This looks too much like the taking of power," but it did not say that the workers would take power or should take power. It said, "Labor may feel led to manage more activities," but the word was "may" not "would" or "should." The defense could argue that the editorial meant exactly what it said, that it was a frank admission that the leaders of the strike could not read the future.

Actually the editorial meant more than that. It had caught the real mood of the general strike, the mood of confident hope, the belief that if only the workers were united, if only they could close down the town, everything would work out for the best. It was this confident hope that led them to confuse the means with the end, the strike with the goal to be achieved. They were sure that if all the unions went on simultaneous strike, a better world would be born. Miss Strong's editorial was an incantation of affirmation, chanted before the image of the general strike.

When she returned to her task of writing the story of the strike, Miss Strong and her assistants on the history committee tried to analyze what had gone wrong so that the "workers of the world may learn from our mistakes as well as from our successes." They decided that they should have stated their objectives more clearly, but they still could not agree what their objective should have been.

Reaction set in. Labor candidates for the city council lost in the 1919 municipal election. The Seattle shipyards were the first to be closed in the postwar slow-down; times were hard, and many of the most militant-the single men who had no stake in the com- munity-roamed away to greener pastures. Those who remained kept looking back to the strike and blaming one another for what had gone wrong.

In 1920 Labor nominated a candidate for mayor-Jimmy Duncan, president of the Central Labor Council, a tough, irascible radical who several times cast the lone dissenting vote against Sam Gompers at national AFL elections. Duncan's candidacy was a defense of the general strike. He was defeated by a Republican lawyer, Hugh M. Caldwell, 50,875 to 33,777.

The militant left was discouraged; the conservatives sighed with rehef. "Seattle is safe against the dictatorship of the proletariat," a commentator wrote. "No man and no group of men can dictate to this town."

Not long after the election Lincoln Steffens, a leader among the muckraking reporters, came to town on a lecture tour. After his formal talk Miss Strong took him to Blanc's-a basement cafe popular with Seattle radicals and bohemians-for dinner and "the real story."

At first she asked him questions about Russia, for he was just back from Moscow, but Steffens was one of the world's great reporters and soon he was asking the questions. He wanted to know about Seattle and the general strike.

"All the old comradeship is torn to pieces," she told him. "All the old friends are calling each other traitors."

"When did it start?" asked Steffens.

"It's been getting worse for months," she said. "The Central Labor Council meetings that used to have such fine speeches from workers all over the world have turned into nasty wrangles between carpenters and plumbers for control of little jobs. I think it began when the shipyards closed and the metal trades workers began to leave.

"These workers' enterprises we were so proud of began to go to pieces. And everybody who took part in them got blamed. Now some of the members of our staff are attacking Harry Ault, our editor, most horribly. One of them told me that if I didn't join the attack they would rub my name in the dirt. That from a man I used to like."

She went on with the tale of bitterness that grows from defeat. Steffens told her that she would have to choose sides; she would have to go with one group or the other, with those who felt the fault lay with not going far enough or with those who felt the fault lay with having gone too fast.

"I can understand both sides somewhat," she protested. "I must help them get together. They were such good comrades before, and we all went ahead so rapidly. They must be good comrades again."

"Never," the bearded reporter exclaimed. "Never. The gulf will grow wider. It is growing all over the world." He talked of what it had been like in Moscow where, it seemed, the issues,were clearer.

"Oh, I'd give anything if I could go there," she said.

"Why don't you then?" said Steffens.

She did. Twenty-nine years later, when the friends in Moscow turned against her and expelled her as a turncoat and a spy, she returned to Seattle. Her home town had changed. It was a middle class town now, a town of high wages and white collars, a pros - perous town dominated by a fat, bland, tough labor leader named Dave Beck, who as a young truck driver had learned better than anyone else the lesson of the general strike.

Murray C. Morgan, "The Seattle General Strike," Skid Road, an informal portrait of Seattle. New York: The Viking Press, 1960. p. 199-219.

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