"No One Knows Where This Will Lead"

The Seattle General Strike in Historical Context
by Dr. John Ruhland, Free Press Contributor

Part Three: The strike and lessons learned from it

At 10 am on Thursday, February 6, 1919, the Seattle General Strike began, and 60,000 workers went on strike in solidarity with over 25,000 metal trades workers in the shipyards. 15,000 workers in Tacoma joined the strike. The Seattle Central Labor Council's strike committee, which organized and ran the strike, was made up of 300 representatives of various unions who almost unanimously voted for the strike. This committee, as well as a Workmen's Soldiers' and Sailors' Council, appealed to the strikers to fight for the nationalization of key industries in addition to their other demands. An executive committee of 15 was chosen by the general committee to plan the details of the strike.

University of Washington President Henry Suzzallo, chair of the State Council of Defense, demanded Secretary of War Baker send in federal troops. They were sent to "combat the Bolshevik threat." The reactionary executive committee of the AFL union condemned the actions of the strike committee, threatening various members with expulsion from their positions on the committee and from their jobs. International officers of the AFL invaded the area by the trainload, and threatened to revoke the charters of the participating unions. As in many other cases where the international officers sell-out the workers, these threats were one reason the strike ended early. Unlike the Minneapolis Teamster Strike some years later, local labor union leaders gave in to the bureaucratic officers of their international.

Because the original shipyard worker strike was organized by the AFL, it is considered an AFL strike rather than an IWW strike. As many workers held cards in both unions, and since the radical workers did the actual planning, the IWW deserves much of the credit. It is even more impressive that the strike occurred when one realizes that the most radical local AFL officials were in Chicago participating in a rally for the release of Tom Mooney when the plans for the strike were made. O'Connor mentions that it is even more amazing that the strike was pulled off with craft unions, which had good contracts that had to be broken and favorable constitutions that had to be ignored.

Media attempted to turn people against the strikers. The "Business Chronicle" tried to pit returned soldiers against other workers by suggested striking workers be replaced by the soldiers. Provoking workers to violence is one tactic used to discredit strikes and other popular movements. Well-armed soldiers and sailors paraded through the streets, and trucks bearing machine guns raced back and forth in order to provoke the striking workers. Nevertheless, first-hand accounts report a dramatic silence in the city. Instead of saws ringing, birds could be heard chirping. The only violence was a single instance in which the police assaulted a worker. Crime actually dropped to less than one-third of normal levels. The normal police docket of 100 per day fell to 30 per day during the strike.

The Cooperative Food Products Association was raided and their records were confiscated by the Liquor Board's "Dry Squad" in an unsuccessful attempt to shut down the Association. The Association, a cooperative formed by unions and the Grange, had promised strikers that food would be available to them. Throughout the strike, there were 21 cafeterias serving meals for 35 cents, 25 cents with a union card. According to O'Connor, part of the reason things went so smoothly during the strike is that during planning of the strike, there had been much discussion on Lenin's speech regarding the importance of civic management when the people take power.

The strike lasted through Tuesday, February 11. The Equity Press, which published the IWW paper, and the Socialist Party were raided in the open-shop reaction that followed the strike. According to The Bloodstained Trail; a history of Militant Labor in the US, the opportunistic Mayor Ole Hanson earned $38,000 on a seven-month tour lecturing on how he saved the US from a revolution. He also wrote a book, and because of his new-found popularity, had hopes for running for president. This from a politician who entered office while loudly and often declaring he was a friend of labor. These declarations were undoubtedly due to the fact that over 25 percent of Seattle citizens were in unions. According to the book Skid Road, at the very beginning of the strike, Hanson asked some of the labor leaders to lunch and over coffee 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." Things changed quickly, and the night before the strike, he sat in the bedroom of his new fourteen-room house and worked on plans for a military defense. Gun stores did very well prior to the strike.

After the strike, 31 workers, all members of the IWW, were arrested and charged with criminal anarchy for trying to overthrow the government. No one was ever convicted.

The backlash from the General Strike included the passing of draconian federal laws outlawing progressive activities, including publishing anything that advocated or justified sedition as a means of effecting social or economic change (The actual wording is even more broad and vague). J. Edgar Hoover first showed his infamous abilities to round up radicals in "Justice" Department raids under these new laws. These laws effectively condoned and promoted violence against leftists, as is demonstrated by the Centralia Massacre. In Centralia, the IWW Hall was attacked for a second time on November 11, 1919 by the American Legion. In defending he hall, one Wobbly was beaten, castrated, and hung. While in Centralia recently, I learned of second-hand reports of other Wobblies being killed, their bodies being burned in sawdust furnaces.

Although mainstream accounts touted the Seattle General Strike as a failure, this is a biased conclusion and an attempt to minimize an important event in labor history. The strike provided a practical training session for radicals. Murray Morgan wrote in Skid Road, that the main problem with the strike was that its goals were never declared. The means were confused with the end, the strike became the goal rather than a means to a greater end. Although the Wobblies believed it was the beginning of the American Socialist Revolution, the strike committee probably never considered this a real goal.

Key lessons learned by workers during this strike include the importance of a working class paper to carry strike news which does not promote the propaganda of the wealthy minority, the necessity of having strikes in multiple localities concurrently for strikes to be effective, and the requirement that international officials of unions should not have any power during strikes. One lesson that was reinforced in Seattle was the consistent role of the state -- especially the police and military -- against workers as a strike-breaker.

Not long after the strike, in September, 1919, 365,000 steel workers in ten states went on strike. In November, 1919, 400,000 United Mine Workers went on strike to demand a 60 percent increase in wages and a 30-hour workweek.

To briefly include the present, political general strikes have been burgeoning according to labor journalist Kim Moody. Worldwide, there have been more political mass strikes since 1996 than at any time in the last century. Some of these were organized in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Greece, Haiti, Italy, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and Spain. Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike!, was in Seattle on March 5th for a lecture commemorating the 1919 Seattle General Strike and the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike. He was greeted with much applause when he suggested the general strike could be used now in the US to oppose the destruction of Social Security. An internationalist would prefer the general strike to be used to oppose the US aggressions in Iraq and Kosovo, among other places.

It is no easy matter to stop the industrial activity in a city of 700,000 people. The Seattle General Strike was the beginning of a wave of strikes, but it was also practice at what it will be like when people democratically take control of all industries.