Historic Tracts
A look at Washington's pioneer labor reform press -when journalism met activism
by Carlos Schwantes
Reprinted with permission from the Pacific Northwest Quarterly
From lamentably racist anti-chinese beginnings, labor journalism in the Northwest from the 1880s to the 1920s matured into thoughtful radicalism and mainstream status. The area spawned nationally distributed socialist and Wobbly publications, at least one of which is still in print. Seattle's daily Union Record achieved the highest circulation in the city, and regularly referred to its lesser competitors, the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, as the "kept press." Schwantes' article below reminds us of this period when class consciousness was not kept in the closet.
The Washington labor movement was seemingly born with an ax or shovel in one hand and a newspaper in the other. In the late 19th century, even in remote logging camps, well-thumbed copies of labor and reform journals provided Washington's workers with a panoramic view of labor developments in the East, England, and Australia, and constituted a veritable fount of inspiration for militant, producer-conscious workers.
The cornerstone of labor was the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. They espoused an idealistic social and economic program that especially appealed to the workers who flooded the territory to claim the opportunities promised in literally tons of promotional pamphlets issued by railroads and real estate speculators.
Severe and unexpected depression accompanied by completion of the Northern Pacific and Canadian Pacific railroads in the mid-1880s turned many a dream into a nightmare. The railroads' discharge of hundreds of Chinese construction workers heightened social tensions caused by unemployment, because the Chinese competed with Caucasians for the few available jobs.
The Seattle Daily Call, which once claimed the largest circulation in the city, directed its blatantly sinophobic message at both workers and the community at large. Passions aroused in part by the paper culminated in the mob violence and martial law that rocked Tacoma and Seattle in 1885 and 1886. Anti-Chinese hysteria soon declined, and so too did the fortunes of the Call. Nonetheless, the Call was a prototype of several general circulation dailies and weeklies that sometimes attempted to boost readership by carrying items of special interest to the region's workers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer even ran a labor section as a regular Sunday feature for a while in the early 20th century.
From Racism to Co-ops
A second type of labor-oriented journal appeared during the Seattle disturbances of 1886. Because anti-Chinese agitation brought disappointingly few benefits to white workers, some disillusioned laborers turned to communitarianism as a better solution to the mounting distress associated with laissez-faire capitalism. Seattle attorney George Venable Smith and other former anti-Chinese agitators founded the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony at Port Angeles. The colony's organ, the Model Commonwealth, carried the gospel of communitarianism to distant parts of the United States. It also carried news of Knights of Labor activities in western Washington.
The Northern Light, which appeared in 1887, was part of an earnest effort to give labor a base more solid than anti-Chinese hysteria. William Galvani, a civil engineer with a penchant for reform schemes, established the paper in Tacoma, and it served as the official voice of the Knights of Labor in Puget Sound and the central labor bodies in Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane.
The almost total collapse of job-conscious trade unionism in Washington during the four lean years that followed the panic of 1893 encouraged the rich diversity of thought that characterized the state's labor-reform press for the next two decades. Buffeted on all sides by massive unemployment, organized labor fortified itself with potent drafts of class consciousness and political activism. Desperate workers flocked to join the several industrial armies that swept across the region in 1894, and together with angry farmers they swelled the ranks of the newly formed Populist Party.
The Populist revolt routed for a time Washington's Republicans and Democrats; it also spawned more than 60 protest journals in the state. Two papers spoke for Populism's influential labor wing: the Seattle People's Call and the Freemen's Labor Journal of Spokane.
Anarchists Censored
Hard times coupled with the election of Populist governor John R. Rogers created an intellectual climate conducive to reform panaceas far more radical that Populism. Chief among these were anarchism, socialism, and communitarianism. The Firebrand of Portland Oregon, until squelched by postal authorities because one issue contained an allegedly obscene poem by Walt Whitman, had a strong following among anarchists in western Washington. Beginning in 1898, anarchists at Home Colony, a utopian settlement near Tacoma, published a series of journals to continue the proselytizing begun by the Firebrand, and several met a similar fate.
The decline of the Populist movement in Washington did not result in a decline of interest in radical solutions to society's ills. A number of Populists moved leftward to embrace socialism. Two important new labor-reform journals appeared in 1900: the Seattle Union Record and the Seattle Socialist. Gordon Rice, who had presided over two short-lived ventures in the mid-1890s, edited the Union Record during its formative years. The paper at first wavered between supporting regional labor movements and the AFL, and provided a forum for all schools of reform thought. After the central labor council purchased it outright in 1903, it tended to become more conservative and pro-AFL.
The Socialist was born out of the frustration felt by Dr. Hermon Titus and other radicals when they failed to gain power in the revived Seattle labor movement. Launched "to organize the slaves of capital to vote their own emancipation," the Socialist became the leading exponent of left-wing socialism in the US. Its narrow, rigid view of socialism kept countless workers out, but the paper helped nurture several young radicals in the Pacific Northwest, including William Z. Foster, future head of the American Communist Party.
By the eve of World War I, socialists were editing two of the most important labor papers in the state, the Seattle Union Record and the Spokane Labor World, successor to the Freemens' Labor Journal. E.B. Ault, who as a teenager at Equality Colony had edited Industrial Freedom and the Young Socialist, turned the Union Record into one of the few labor dailies in the US, and pushed subscriptions to 112,000 shortly after World War I.
Front page banner for the June 4, 1898 edition of Industrial Freedom
(small print, top line: "Until a Slave Recognizes the He is a Slave, He Can Never Gain Freedom")
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Ingenious Wobblies
A maverick among the state's labor journals was the Industrial Worker, published by the Spokane locals of the Industrial Workers of the World. During the free speech fight that rocked Spokane in 1909, police halted printing of the paper, but ingenious Wobblies soon had their paper back on the city's streets after making arrangements to have it printed in the safe haven of Seattle. With its sardonic cartoon critiques of plutocrats and labor aristocrats, it was the single most colorful labor journal to appear in Washington.
Washington's pioneer labor-reform press mirrors a labor movement in search of identity. Countless columns of news and comment record labor's sometimes halting passage from youthful idealism to the sober maturity that results from success, social acceptance, and bureaucratization. Unfortunately, details of the transition are frequently obscured because, for several of these journals, only scattered issues survive.
Carlos Schwantes, teaches history at the University of Idaho. This article has been condensed and reprinted with permission from the Pacific Northwest Quarterly, July 1980. The PNQ version contains an annotated checklist of many historical labor papers in addition to those recounted above, and notes libraries where they may be found.
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Contents on this page were published in the July/August, 1996 edition of the Washington Free
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