Radical Seattle. Cal Winslow
the woods began with demands for clean bedding, showers, and decent food in the logging camps, then the eight-hour day. This was the path to power, in both the short and long term; the new society would be built piecemeal in struggles in the shell of the old. The CLC’s view was much the same as the IWW’s, though the long term was longer. Was, then, the general strike an effective weapon? In the forests? Yes, it seemed. In Seattle? A strike going beyond a work stoppage, beyond a single industry, had never been tried in a city. Not until 1919. No one knew.
NOVEMBER 11, 1918. THE WAR WAS FINISHED. There were wild celebrations everywhere, in France, Britain, and the United States, spontaneous demonstrations of relief and happiness. Millions took to the streets of Paris and New York. In London, “a primitive jamboree” ensued, with crowds roaring, cheering, drinking, copulating in the shadows. In Brest, in Brittany, where the American soldiers first disembarked, the city was “wild with joy,” factory sirens howling, the ships’ whistles screaming in the harbor. The American soldiers still there were hugged and kissed. On November 7, the Seattle Star had pronounced, “War Is Over!” At once, people took to the streets. In the morning, the mayor was awakened to find the streets already filled, his planned proclamation of a “holiday” irrelevant. Makeshift bands appeared, people banging garbage can lids, lunch buckets, car horns blasting. Then came the sailors, ordered out to make the celebration official and properly patriotic. Then the shipyard owners closed the yards, foremen shepherded the men into the streets, swelling already huge crowds. The entire length of Second Avenue became gridlocked.
“The war to end all wars,” the patriotic papers repeated without a blush. Ten million lost in the slaughter on the Western Front, 36 million casualties. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were millions more dead, vast swathes of devastation, and the heart of the continent in ruins. New armies emerged, this time of scavengers and homeless, creatures without hope. The Seattle Star featured a half-page, triumphant Jesus, captioned “Peace on Earth.” Then came the mindless boastings of victory and babble about “sacred unions,” “homes for heroes,” and “democracy at full tilt.”
The workers of Seattle had never really supported the war, unless, of course, one reduces it to “supporting the troops,” the mantra in all wars. The Union Record’s response to the war’s end was rather more subdued. News from the front competed with accounts of “revolution” in Germany and the shortcomings of the wage awards promised to the shipyard workers.8 Still, workers celebrated, especially if it meant an end to long hours, short pay, and conscription, on the one hand, or charges of “sedition” and “criminal syndicalism,” the red squads, raids, prison sentencess on the other. The death toll was high: of the nearly five million Americans who served in the First World War, 116,000 were killed. The Battle of Meuse Argonne alone took the lives of 26,000.
The “peace,” however, was short-lived. The same day the Seattle Star cried out, “War Is Over!” it reported that sailors in Kiel, the home of the Kaiser’s high seas fleet, had seized the ships. “The crew of the dreadnoughts Kaiser and Schleswig mutinied and waved red flags yesterday morning. They arrested their officers, 20 of whom were shot…. The sailors threaten to blow up the ships if they are attacked.”9 Soldiers in the town’s garrison had joined them, and the city was effectively governed by a council of sailors, soldiers, and workmen. Thousands more were soon marching with red flags, and the revolt was spreading. There was street fighting in Hamburg, mutinies spreading. “Several garrisons in Holstein have deserted and are reported marching on Kiel, waving red flags.”10 The revolution in the West, it seemed, had begun.
In the winter of 1918, much of Seattle—the schools and most public places—was closed, as a result of Spanish influenza. Fifteen hundred were dead already; it was unclear if the epidemic had ended. Still, the first loggers were drifting back. They joined others—wandering, homeless men on the city’s mean streets, waiting for work to resume. This was ordinary in Seattle’s winter. Now, however, newcomers appeared, some still in uniform, wanting work. The Union Record reported that peace abroad was bringing hunger at home. A union representative from the Metal Trades Council told reporters that he had been approached “by 15 soldiers in just one night, all for bed and board.”11
The paper foresaw unemployment and “bread lines coming.” “It looks as if that move for the six-hour day or even the four-hour day, in order to pass the jobs around, may be needed in a hurry, right here in Seattle.”12 The Machinists of Hope Lodge responded by ruling that “no member shall under any circumstances be allowed to work more than eight hours during a current work day, or more than 44 hours in a working week.” They proposed “a shortening of the work day policy as palliative to unemployment, for civilians and discharged service men alike, as a result of the large number of men suddenly thrown on the labor market.” The Lodge also adopted “a clause for their new working agreements providing that when conditions arise in any plant whereby men are to be laid off, that instead of reducing the force, the hours be reduced to six hours per day, five days a week.” The Lodge also instructed members that “they must accept employment only through the union offices so that the disgraceful features of the ‘job hunting’ to which American working men have been submitted may be eliminated as far as possible.”13
The shipyards, the core of Seattle’s economy, nevertheless still seemed to prosper. The Star’s lead headline read, “American Shipbuilding Will Continue, Declares Schwab.”14 Charles Schwab, the head of Bethlehem Steel, who had been charged but not convicted of war profiteering, was viciously anti-union. President Wilson appointed him Director General of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, its board given wartime control of all shipbuilding in the United States. Seattle’s shipyard workers had chafed under his wartime regime, and the high cost of living became the issue. Thus, the killing in Europe, most of it, had not been finished a month before the Metal Trades Council, representing the shipyard unions, took a strike vote. Members overwhelmingly rejected the pay “awards” (salary adjustments) of both the shipyard owners and the wartime Emergency Shipping Board. Their demands were for wage increases and for raising the pay of the least skilled to reduce inequality in the yards. They were not alone; across the country workers believed they had sacrificed for the cause of war, but that the “high cost of living” had been an unfair burden. The demand everywhere was for wage increases. Real enough in itself, the demand was also an indication of deeper frustrations and dissatisfactions. The strike wave of the war years—an epidemic of strikes—was both national and international, inspired in part by syndicalism, the new workplace radicalism. Seattle was at once a strike center and a radical center, a stronghold of working-class socialism with a vision of a better world. Mocking Wilson and the local “interests,” Seattle’s workers called for self-determination and democracy at home.
The Union Record thrived in this setting. Seattle’s workers, informed by the paper, made the rebellions abroad their rebellions: London’s dockers, laborers in Buenos Aires, the “Golden Triangle” of revolt in Italy—Turin, Milan, Genoa—where the young Antonio Gramsci urged the creation of workers’ councils. It brought news from the Red Clyde in Scotland and its shop stewards’ movement. John Maclean and Willie Gallagher became well-known figures: Maclean the revolutionary socialist and Gallagher the worker who “never had a salary, never had expenses paid by the movement … the skilled brass finisher who has always worked at his trade when he wasn’t in jail.”15 Then came the Soviets in Budapest, insurrection in Bavaria, and the German revolution. On December 27, 1919, an article from Berlin opened: “Wives and sweethearts of the mutinous sailors have seized rifles and joined in defense of the royal palace against the loyal guard.”16 The ordeals of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg would be featured on the Union Record’s front pages as, alas, were their deaths.17 It ran news from Johannesburg and Mexico and Winnipeg. Closer to home, it warned readers, “Southerners Plan Terror Against Negro.”18
In the United States, rebellion emerged in crises on several fronts, including the strike wave. It began early in the decade, accelerated in the war years, then reached its peak in 1919. In 1917, more than six million workdays were lost to strikes. The metal workers led the first strikes, then the shipbuilders (separate from metal workers), coal miners, copper miners, textile and timber workers followed. Sixty-seven