Seattle: 1900-1920 -From Boomtown, Through Urban Turbulence ...

Seattle 1900 - 1920From Boomtown,Through Urban Turbulence,To RestorationRichard C. BernerPaul Dorpat

Table of ContentsIntroduction.....................................................................1Part OneSeattle at the Turn of the Century....................................4Manufacturing .................................................................7Fight for Control of the Waterfront................................10Seeding of the Municipal Ownership Movement..........18Industrial Relations........................................................24City Politics, 1900–1904: The Traditional Period.........29Social Fabric of the City................................................32Popular Entertainment...................................................45Education.......................................................................60Part TwoCity Politics, 1904–1912: Progressivism Emerges........66Part ThreeThe Economy, Labor, and Politics, 1913–1917.............90Industrial Relations......................................................101City Politics, 1914–1916.............................................108Part FourWar Time: Preparedness to Belligerency...............130Shipyard Strike: “Thunder on the Left” ......................149Part FiveThe 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strikeand Its Aftermath..........................................................159Epilogue.......................................................................189Bibliography................................................................192Index............................................................................201

DedicationIn memory ofMurray MorganandRobert E. Burke

AcknowledgementsiiiKaryl Winn, retired Head of Manuscripts & UniversityArchives DivisionGlenda Pearson, Head of Microform & NewspaperCollections, University of WashingtonCarla Rickerson, Gary Lundell, Janet Ness, SpecialCollections, U.W. LibrariesSara Early, Editor of the Pacific Northwest Quarterly forher editing of the revised editionEleanor Toews, Seattle Public Schools ArchivistScott Cline, Anne Frantilla, Seattle Municipal ArchivesCarolyn Marr, Museum of History and IndustryLibrarianJodee Fenton, Seattle Public Library, Seattle RoomAndrea Flower, designer of the revised editionErin Stallings, proofreader of the revised edition

PrefaceThe original volume of my three volume Seattle in the 20th Century (1900-1950)elicited many positive published reviews and informal critiques. Titled Seattle 1900-1920:From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence, To Restoration, the late Murray Morgan consideredit to be “by far the most informative history of the period when Seattle rose to dominance inthe Pacific Northwest.” Portland’s historian E. Kimbark MacColl wrote it “should stand asthe most definitive account of Seattle’s historic growth for many years to come.” QuintardTaylor added “The book’s other major strength is the tracing of themes usually relegatedto the fringes of urban history—labor activism, popular entertainment, the City Beautifulmovement, the university and the city.”These and other favorable comments encouraged me to consider a revised edition,one that would this time be subjected at the onset to professional editing to overcomecompositional and writing deficiencies of the original.The most obvious improvement, though, is the incorporation of historicalphotographs by Paul Dorpat, whose unique familiarity with Seattle’s history has resultedin photographs and captions placed in context that lend both illustrative depth and asense of historical transition to my somewhat lean institutional history. For a statewidecontext dealing specifically with public works readers will benefit by referring to BuildingWashington: A History of Washington State Public Works, by Dorpat and GenevieveMcCoy. As much as I had wished to revise this volume in all probability I would not haveattempted it had Paul not agreed to collaborate.What distinguishes this history is its unique exploration of archival/manuscriptholdings of the University of Washington Libraries that I and my colleague Karyl Winnaccumulated over a period of more than thirty years. That she persuaded Puget SoundPower and Light (currently Puget Sound Energy) to donate their records to the Universitymade it possible to document the public power movement more fully by having access torecords of the dominant private utility in western Washington—here already were recordsin the collection representing proponents of public power. Their records also added muchunique documentation of industrial relations. The company—at the center of much of theregion’s history – is to be congratulated for making access possible for studies such as thisand others sure to follow.Should the reader refer to the bibliography in the list of theses and dissertationstake note of the dates when they were written. A substantial number were written before1960 and thereby had practically no benefit from archival sources collected after 1959, oneyear from the formal establishment of the Manuscript Collection under administration ofa professional curator. Those written subsequently did use these source materials oftenas they were being accessioned. None, incidentally, used Puget Sound Power & LightCompany records because they were not acquired until 1972, though not explored until mystudy began in 1985.Such graduate studies, leading to masters and doctoral degrees, constitute thebuilding blocks for research by others. Many were subsequently published in articleform in periodicals; some substantially in whole. In whatever format they are inherentlyrevisionist in character by reason of their use of archival sources to which additions arebeing continuously acquired.

IntroductionIntroductionIn presenting a comprehensive history of Seattle in its twentieth century, I wasdrawn as if by a magnet to the city’s politics and economy. It is the combination of politicsand economics that produces the wealth that allows society to function. William Greiderobserves in Who Will Tell the People? that politics “exists to resolve the largest questions ofthe society. . . . At its best, politics creates and sustains social relationships. . . . Democracypromises to do this through an inclusive process of conflict and deliberation, debate andcompromise.” During the period covered in this and the second volume (1900–1940),corporate structures—including businesses, trade associations, and elitist social clubs—dominated the economy and politics, which in turn protected and advanced their interests.At the turn of the century, these corporate structures were beingchallenged nationally and locally by countervailing forces thatbecame known as the Progressive Movement.*Signaling the onset of the movement, PresidentTheodore Roosevelt successfully intervened in the 1902 strikeon behalf of the anthracite miners and created a conciliationboard to settle future disputes. Further illustrating this shiftaway from uninhibited corporate power, Roosevelt broke upthe Northern Securities Company in 1904. The company hadeffectively established a monopoly with its consolidation ofthe Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, and the Burlingtonrailroad corporations and could fix freight rates at whateverlevel it chose. At the turn of the century railroad corporationsdominated politics in most states, including Washington. Thisdomination allowed the arbitrary setting of freight rates thatcaused the Populist Party to form and figured prominentlyin the reform agenda of the more urban-based ProgressiveMovement.Waterborne commerce was Seattle’s economic base.The railroad companies controlled the waterfront, settingwharfage rates and impeding construction of a union station.It was inevitable that the business community at large wouldbegin to oppose the railroad companies’ control once its leadersfound these companies blocking the way to the commercialexpansion that they anticipated would come with the opening ofthe Panama Canal. These free enterprise business leaders joinedwith proponents of public ownership to pass in 1911 an actallowing the creation of municipal corporations for port cities.With this act the Port of Seattle was born.With this broadside theNorthern Pacific Railroadheadlines its contributionto the twentieth century:daily service betweenSeattle and St. Paul onthe railroad’s luxuriousNorthcoast Limited. It is theaccomplishment of a century(roughly) of advances increaturely comforts sinceLewis and Clark first blazedthe route.* John K. Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1962). See also Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of theAmerican Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). Phillips in effect updates Galbraith, placing thedevelopment of American capitalism in a larger historical context by comparing it with the rise andfall of previously dominant Western economic powers.

IntroductionCedar River Taste. During an 1899 visit to the Cedar Rivertwo unidentified members of the Seattle City Councilshow their appreciation for the taste of the water thatwould soon replace Lake Washington as the primarysource of drinking water for the community.The public ownership movementgrew out of the City of Seattle’s attempts tocontrol its water supply in the mid-1890s.Once it acquired that control, the city alsobegan to generate hydroelectric power atthe Cedar River reservoir, putting it in competition with the Seattle Electric Company ofthe Stone and Webster Management Corporation. The stage was hereby set for a titanicpolitical conflict running throughout the period from 1900 to 1940. The public powermovement was statewide, involving the two municipally owned systems of Tacoma andSeattle as well as the Washington State Grange, all of which were united against the state’sprivate power companies. The movement climaxed in 1930, when voters approved Initiative1, which authorized the creation of public utility districts. But this merely expanded theconflict, extending it to the Columbia River basin and necessitating the involvement of thefederal government.Public ownership was the single issue around which reformers gathered duringthe first two decades of the century; it brought together organized labor, the WashingtonFederation of Women’s Clubs, the Ministerial Federation (forerunner of the Council ofChurches), and the Municipal League—all, including organized labor, staunchly middleclass. This constituency was held together by its dedication to public power. The issue ofpublic power became morally charged in a way that vice and police corruption—whichproved to have an ephemeral constituency—did not.Central to industrial relations was the contest between employers, who pressed forthe open shop, and labor unions, which wanted the closed shop. In the open shop, employersbargained with employees individually; in the closed shop, employers bargained with theunions, which acted on behalf of the employees. Employers emerged victorious from the1919 General Strike, sustaining their version of the open shop, known nationwide as theAmerican Plan, until 1934. Under federal protection, the union movement revived in 1934,and organized labor once again became politically active, forming a coalition with otheraggrieved groups to constitute New Deal liberalism.The Seattle public school system and the University of Washington were funded bythe state through an inherently political process. Both depended upon state tax revenues forfunding; the public schools were financed by local property taxes as well. During the firsttwo decades of the century, Seattle’s schools were relatively well funded because the city’supwardly mobile middle class enthusiastically supported the forward-looking educationalpolicies of the superintendent, Frank B. Cooper. However, he and his successors had todeal with a successful tax revolt in 1921 led by leaders of the business community, justas fresh demands were being placed on the school system to adapt to rapid technologicalchanges in business and mass production. Passage of the forty-mill limitation on propertytaxes in 1932, combined with the effects of the Great Depression, further complicatedpublic school funding. The University of Washington was also affected.

IntroductionCivil liberties protections were gradually extended to the general populationthrough the combined efforts of the Central Labor Council of Seattle, the WashingtonFederation of Women’s Clubs, and the Ministerial Federation. Traditionally, the courts andthe constabulary rarely protected civil liberties, and they did so even less often as tensionsrose during events just preceding U.S. involvement in the Great War. During the war, civilliberties came under attack from a federalized vigilantism, to which local authorities lentpatriotic cover. Trade unionism in particular was affected, because maintaining the openshop required curtailing free speech and free assembly. Sympathetic courts readily respondedwith injunctions against strike action. During the next two decades, civil libertarians weremet with frustration when trying to undo the legislation and questionable incarcerations ofthe war and early postwar years and when seeking elemental First Amendment protectionsfor free speech and free assembly.All through the period, issues of morality erupted, and reformers focused upon thepolice protection offered to vice operators. Before 1911 it was often these issues of moralitythat caused disparate groups to act collectively to gain political reform. These successes ledto more direct citizen participation in the political process: the initiative, referendum, andrecall. While winning these reforms, citizens also developed instruments of home rule tocombat the influence of absentee owners, in particular the railroads and utility franchises.Home rule as a concept came to Seattle in the wake of its success in the 1890s in cities suchas Buffalo, San Francisco, Cleveland, Toledo, and St. Louis.Public welfare programs before 1933 had depended upon private charity andcounty funding and provided relief primarily to the deaf and blind, the indigent poor, anddependent children. These programs did not provide work relief for the unemployed. Thelong-term unemployment of the Great Depression lay far beyond their scope for a poor lawmentality persisted until challenged in the 1930s, whenindigence no longer had to be proved. Nonetheless,even then the mind-set persisted in conservative statepolicies and the governor, though a Democrat, opposedNew Deal programs. This led to bitter fights over theadministration of unemployment and outdoor relief,and these struggles preoccupied government officials atevery level and the citizenry at large.Inspired in part by the formation of Mount RainierNational Park in 1899, the Washington Federation ofWomen’s Clubs in 1904 lobbied for the creation ofthe Elk National Park on the Olympic Peninsula. TheMountaineers club, created in 1906, frequently joinedArgus, the often acerbic Seattle weeklyof political opinion and reporting, isconsistently kind towards Frank B.Cooper with its own caption to theschool administrator’s caricature.“Mr. Cooper is superintendent ofSeattle’s very excellent public schoolsystem, of which he has a right to feelproud.forces with the Federation, most emphatically in thefight to establish the Olympic National Park in the 1930s,when the chief opponent was the U.S. Forest Service,long allied with logging interests. Our contemporaryconservation movement took root in this depression-timestruggle with the Forest Service, although from 1938 to1950, conservative forces, finding cover in the wartime

Part Oneemergency and onset of the cold war, steadily eroded the liberal programs launched underthe New Deal and sparked even earlier by the Progressive Movement during the years wewill now survey.Part OneSeattle at the Turn of the CenturyThe arrival of the SS Portland from the Klondike on 17 July 1897, with its “ton ofgold,” launched Seattle’s twentieth-century economy. The city was favorably positioned fordeveloping trade not only with Alaska but also with Asia. James J. Hill’s Great NorthernRailroad (GN) had finally given the city its own transcontinental connection with marketsto the east in 1893—ten years after the Northern Pacific Railroad (NP) had connectedTacoma’s lumber mills with eastern markets. Seattleites never fully forgave the NP forkindling rivalry with its neighbor down the Sound. But the depression of 1893 to 1896 hadput a damper upon Seattle’s early commercial development. With the Portland’s berthing,the city began to throb at the prospect ahead.During previous decades, the nascent city’s merchants had steadily cultivatedtrading relationships with southeast Alaska, British Columbia, and the Puget Soundhinterland. Seattle became the regional jobbing and trading center by the early 1890s.Though the commodities traded were ever so humble, a solid commercial base was beinglaid for subsequent expansion. Most traded were groceries, followed by dry goods, meat,hardware, and machinery. Small vessels, nicknamed the Mosquito Fleet, swarmed over thesound carrying lesser commodities: local farm products, lumber, and fish, all of which wereexchanged for processed foods and farm and household supplies.That the vessel that ignited the goldrush should be named for Seattle’sprinciple commercial rival was anirony no doubt enjoyed by thosehere crowding the waterfront underthe influence of “Gold Fever.” Theexhilarated crowd admires thesteamship Portland resting in itssnug slip between Schwabacher’swharf and the Pike Street Fish Wharf,the present site of Waterfront Park.Puget Sound is considerably closerto the wealth of Alaska than theColumbia River and Seattle exploitedthis advantage. The pioneers werepleased to call Puget Sound the“Mediterranean of the Pacific.” It hadno perils at its entrance like the barat the mouth of the Columbia River.Any passage to Portland was madeunpredictable when passing throughthat “Graveyard of the Pacific.”

Seattle at the Turn of the CenturyAs though by design, small local railroads complemented this waterbornecommerce with the hinterland. Coal, carried by rail to Seattle from the Green River,Newcastle, and Issaquah coalfields, constituted the city’s second largest export before theturn of the century. Coal bunkers of the Oregon Improvement Company and the NorthernPacific snaked into Elliott Bay via Railroad Avenue. The coal was then shipped mainly toCalifornia.Gold discoveries in Alaska simply stimulated the city’s merchants to expandexisting operations. According to John Rosene, head of the Northwest CommercialCompany in Alaska, Seattle interests controlled ninety percent of the ships involved inthe Alaska trade after 1905. By 1912 salmon would displace gold as the foundation of theAlaska trade. Canned salmon from Alaska and from Puget Sound, raw silk from Japan, andlumber from Sound mills provided the Great Northern with commodities that were boundfor midwestern and eastern markets. The GN already had plenty of freight to supply Asiaand Alaska: heavy machinery, hardware, cotton, grain, general merchandise, and cannerysupplies chief among them.When extending his railroad to Seattle, Hill had trade with Asia foremost in mind.Between 1895 and 1896, commerce with Japan had doubled. It then tripled the next year.Between 1895 and 1900, the city’s waterborne commerce had expanded eightfold. Theyear 1901 saw the Asian trade double as both the Nippon Yushen Kaisha Line (whichhad been handling GN cargo since 1896) and Hamburg’s Kosmos Line expanded serviceand the China Mutual Line entered the market. In 1905 Hill contributed the “two largestcargo carriers afloat,” the SS Minnesota and SS Dakota, which carried cargo to and fromYokohama, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Manila (trade with Manila stemmed from U.S.seizure of the Philippines from Spain in 1898). Other lines were steadily added to portoperations in Seattle. By 1920 about thirty shipping companies sailed regularly from ElliottBay.In 1908 the pioneerColman family extendedits formerly modest dockto 705 feet and topped itwith a landmark tower intime for the “MosquitoFleet” buzz of 1909. Itwas the year of thecity’s Alaska YukonPacific Exposition andElliott Bay was crowdedwith excursions. In thisportrait of the youngwharf a full flotilla ofsteamers lines its northslip. On the outsideCourtesy, Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society. #5011-17is the City of Everettreminding us with abanner to “Stop Over in Everett.” One of the larger steamers on the Sound, the Indianapolis, is on the right. Itserved the route between Seattle and Tacoma, the busiest on Puget Sound. In the booming spirit of 1909 the “Cityof Destiny” on Commencement Bay promised with signs of many sizes posted on sites along the busy east shoreof Puget Sound, “You’ll Like Tacoma.”

Part OneWhen Railway and Marine Newsbegan publishing in 1904, its editorsnoted that most of the improvements onthe waterfront had been made since 1900and that the Northern Pacific and thePacific Coast Company alone had builteighteen new piers and warehouses in thenew century. “In general terms it may bestated that the wharfs and warehouses ofSeattle are owned and controlled by thethree great transportation companies: theGreat Northern Railway Company, theNorthern Pacific Railway Company andthe Pacific Coast Company.” The last, thesuccessor to the Oregon ImprovementCompany, operated exclusively in thecoastal trade, using the ships of itsaffiliate, the Pacific Coast SteamshipCompany.In 1903 one of the mainstays of Seattle’s pioneer economy,the coal wharf and bunkers at King Street, was razed andreplaced three blocks south at Dearborn Street with thetwin towers of the Pacific Coast Company—successorsto the pioneer Oregon Improvement Company. In the1960s the landmark towers were razed like much elsesouth of King Street for construction of the sprawlingPier 46 container yard.The NP soon dropped out of the marine business. Independent wharfs, where theMosquito Fleet operated, catered to the trade in Alaska and Puget Sound. These wharfs,Railroad Avenue reached its full width in the first years of the twentieth century. It held nine parallel tracksplus a planked extension on the bay side for wagons to reach the new railroad finger piers. This view of itlooks north from Yesler Way. The sprawling Columbia Street Depot is on the right. Built after the 1889 fire itwas at various times home to the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad, the Northern Pacific, and the GreatNorthern. After the new King Street Union Depot opened in 1905 this clapboard terminus was kept for oddassignments until it was razed in 1910.

scattered among the docks ownedby the railroad companies, consistedmainly of shipyards, boiler works, andmetalworking and cordage plants. Railtransshipment was a major component ofthe city’s economy, employing not onlyrailroad workers but also those involvedin the maritime trades. As the Asian tradesteadily expanded, the rail transshipmentbusiness grew with it: raw silk, tea,curios, matting, and braid traveled byrail to the eastern United States. In fact,special express trains carried the raw silkManufacturingThe Great Northern Railroad’s Pacific Rim behemoths,the SS Minnesota and SS Dakota, berthed bow-to-sternat the railroad’s Smith Cove docks, ca. 1907.to Hoboken, New Jersey, and were given priority over all other traffic including passenger,mail, and the Great Northern’s mainstay, lumber.ManufacturingAt the turn of the century, construction firms dominated Seattle’s manufacturingsector, as the city’s population boomed from 80,671 in 1900 to 237,000 in 1910. Apartfrom construction companies, manufacturing firms were usually small, catering to localand regional needs. In 1900, fourteen woodworking mills employed an annual average ofonly 1,008 wage earners, while construction firms employed 1,372 workers. Constructionworkers were kept fully employed during the first decade of the century, meeting thedemand for housing, warehouses, office buildings, and retail stores; they were also keptThe Columbia and PugetSound depot opened nearthe foot of WashingtonStreet in 1905, one yearearlier than the longanticipatedKing StreetUnion Depot. This smallerCPS depot sat in themiddle of Railroad Avenueand over the formersite of “Ballast Island,”the off-shore mound of“foreign soil” carried hereoriginally as ship’s ballast.With many additions andextensions, the PacificCoast Company’s Pier B—seen here above thedepot—survives as Pier48, the last of the fingerpiers south of Yesler Way.

Part Onebusy installing utilities and leveling the city’s downtown hills. Housing constructionpeaked in the years 1908 1909 as the city geared up for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-PacificExposition. By 1907 the number of lumber mills had doubled, though none of Seattle’smills approached the size of Tacoma’s. While Tacoma’s twenty-one mills, keyed to theexport and Midwest markets, produced about 80,000 board feet a day, Seattle’s twentysevenmilled only 47,000 board feet a day.Spurred by the demand in Alaska for boats and barges, machinery, and heavy andlight hardware, the shipbuilding and foundry industries expanded steadily throughout thefirst two decades of the century. The pioneer Clarence Bagley noted a dozen shipyardsemploying about nineteen hundred men at the beginning of the century. Moran Brothers’yard, the city’s largest, was subsidized by $135,000 from a community subscription drive,earning it a Navy contract in 1902 to build the USS Nebraska. The city fairly shook whenthe steel hull of the battleship was launched in October 1904.The long shed for the Nebraska’s construction runs through the middle of the 1901 artist’s birds-eye of the MoranBrothers Shipyard south of Charles Street, below.

Eastern investors, findingthe yard too profitable for thelocals, took it over in 1906. Itbecame the Seattle Constructionand Dry Dock Company in 1912and was sold to David Skinnerand John Eddy in 1917, partnerswho soon set construction records.By then there were twenty-eightshipyards employing about thirtyfivethousand workers. From 1900to 1919, the number of workersemployed by manufacturing firmsincreased almost fivefold.ManufacturingThe 1904 launch of the battleship Nebraska, right, was the greatesttouchstone of Moran’s life as an industrialist.Table 1: Manufacturing in Seattle, 1900–1919YearNumber ofmanufacturersNumberof workers1909 753 11,5231914 1,014 12,4291919 1,229 40,843This increase was caused by the overwhelming demand for ships during the war.By 1919 about seventy-five percent of the manufacturing workforce was involved inshipbuilding. Before 1910 the average proportion of the population so employed averagedabout six percent. The proportion in 1919-20 was about twelve percent. If 1914 is chosen asa more typical year and total product value is used as an indicator, we find that slaughteringand meatpacking predominated.With one dime in his pocket a 17-year-old RobertMoran was, as he later recounted, “dumped outwithout breakfast on Yesler’s wharf at 6 o’clock in themorning of November 17, 1875.” In another fourteenyears he was running both a sizeable machine shopon the waterfront and the city. Moran was Seattle’sheroic mayor during its Great Fire of 1889. Here,the self-taught mechanic-manufacturer does somefiguring at his desk.Courtesy UW Libraries, Special Collections

10 Part OneIn 1914, as table 2 shows, 1,816 workers were employed in consumer productlines, while 4,398 found work at small foundries, machine shops, lumber mills, printers,and publishers.Table 2: Major Manufacturers in 1914Type of ManufacturerTotal Product Value(in millions of dollars)Number ofWorkersSlaughterhouses and packinghouses $11.10 482Flour mills and gristmills $7.60 279Lumber mills $6.40 2,337Printers and publishers $4.60 1,057Foundries and machine shops $3.30 1,004Bakeries $2.40 534Coffee roasters and grinders $1.60 140Confectioners and ice cream makers $1.50 381Fight for Control of the WaterfrontThose interests that controlled the waterfront, the railroad companies, played acritical role in determining the city’s future. But one among them dominated: the GreatNorthern. As the builder of Seattle’s first transcontinental railroad, it sought to block outprospective entrants and to oppose construction of a common, or union, terminal. TheSeattle attorney Thomas Burke became James Hill’s front man. Burke had migrated to thecity in 1875 and had become one of its most influential men by 1890, ruling the chamberof commerce and placing his proxies in city council.His nomination to the post of territorial chief justice bythe Seattle Bar Association (upon the deaths in quicksuccession of two holders of that post) was indicative ofthe esteem he attracted. Though this appointment wouldmean a big financial loss, he accepted on the conditionthat he would resign on 5 March 1889, when BenjaminHarrison would succeed President Grover Cleveland.He also headed the Seattle, Lake Shore and EasternRailroad Company, whose line was described as starting“from so many places and reaching anywhere.” One ofthe company’s key assets was its lock on thirty feet oftideland beyond the meander line (the line of high tide)over which its railroad tracks ran on pile trestles beforethe harbor lines were legally established. It was calledRailroad Avenue. The Seattle fire of 1889 destroyedThomas Burke, lawyer, with a firm gripon Seattle’s Great Northern Railroad

Fight for Control of the Waterfrontmany of these structures. Given thisopportunity, the city council decided toregrade and straighten Railroad Avenueand other streets; however, the existingfranchises complicated its job.Before the fire, Burke hadacquired a sixty-foot right-of-way onRailroad Avenue for a GN subsidiary, theSeattle and Montana Railroad. Title wastransferred to GN in 1890. By then Burkehad established himself as Hill’s “satrap,”the nickname bestowed upon Burke byhis biographer, Robert C. Nesbit. Burkesoon became Hill’s western counsel.As such, his primary function was toCourteous early-century cartoon of James Hill. obstruct any settlement that might proveunsatisfactory to Hill’s interests.Those gathered at Washington State’s constitutional convention in Olympia inJuly 1889 discussed the legal status of tideland property claims. Would the constitutionalconvention legitimize all of the squatting that had occurred during earlier decades? WhenWashington was a territory, this land was held in trust by the federal government and couldnot legally be filed upon. Nevertheless, most of the tideland had been occupied, undera variety of covers: by lieu land scrip or outright grants from the territorial legislatureand by simply driving in piles. The squatters expected the state legislature to honor theiroccupancy. The convention mandated the formation of a commission to settle these claimsand to reserve harbors and waterways for the state.11The roughly two blocks of Railroad Avenue included in this ca.1904 panorama from the Colman Building reachfrom Colman Dock on the left to the Northern Pacific Pier 3 (now Ivar’s Pier 54) on the right. The irregular line ofsheds packed along the water side of Railroad Avenue has been recently pushed further west to make more roomfor wagons between the railroad tracks and the docks. Marion Street is below the break in the warehouses, right ofcenter, and at the foot of Marion, the West Seattle Ferry dock meets the north wall of Colman Dock. On the right,the tower attached to Fire Station No. 5 at the foot of Madison Street was used for both drying hoses and as anobservation tower and office for Seattle’s Harbormaster, M. C. Jensen.

12 Part OneThe Harbor Lines Commission had to consider some important questions. Whatproportion of the tideland should be reserved for the state? And what effect would thestate’s claims have on the present occupants, including the railroad companies? Theprovision of waterways, for example, would indent the property of the present occupants.The commission wanted the state to have effective control of the harbor and waterways.How to prevent the commission from implementing this interpretation became Burke’sforemost preoccupation: he considered the state to be taking private property for public usewithout compensation. Many, however, preferred state ownership.Even the chamber of commerce’s refusal to join him in opposing the commissioncould not deter Burke. First, he sought and received an injunction from the superior courtjudge I. J. Lichtenberg in Henry Yesler’s suit against the commission—Lichtenberg owedhis appointment to Burke. The state supreme court reversed Lichtenberg’s decision sevenmonths later, in July 1891, upholding the commission by contending that the fact that Yeslerhad wharfs on the tideland did not mean that Yesler owned the land those wharfs werebuilt on. Anticipating an unfavorable decision by the Harbor Lines Commission, Burkeemployed a delaying tactic by insisting that this was a federal matter and not subject tostate jurisdiction. He filed for an injunction in federal district court, upon which sat JudgeCornelius Hanford, who also owed his appointment to Burke. Hanford dutifully issuedthe injunction, even before the briefs were filed. Meanwhile, the state attorney general,W. C. Jones, after bringing suits successively through local and state courts and winningthem all, finally filed before the U.S. Supreme Court, where Burke’s suit was waiting. On19 December 1892, the court decided against Burke because “no federal question was soraised.” But Burke’s delaying tactics worked: the Harbor Lines Commission’s terminationdate was 15 January 1893. The legislature now had to establish a second commission.The legislature enacted a bill transferring the duties of the Harbor Lines Commission toa board of land commissioners with jurisdiction overall state lands. The bill was signed by Governor JohnH. McGraw, an ally of Burke. McGraw then appointedmore compliant commissioners.The new commission laid out new harbor linesand reserved a 300-foot strip of land outside of themeander line for the harbor. The dock owners, particularlythe GN, were unsatisfied. Giving up on the commission,Burke and the GN attorneys in 1899 proceeded to workupon the new Secretary of War to reverse the priorsecretary’s approval of the commission’s action and toredraw the outer harbor line, which would eliminate the300-foot strip reserved for the harbor. Burke and theattorneys were successful: the inner harbor line becamethe official one, and the squatter rights beyond that linewere left intact. In 1903, to accommodate the GN (andnegotiated at Burke’s urging through Hill’s legislativelobbyist James D. Farrell), the harbor lines were furtherextended at Smith Cove.A portrait of Eugene Semple engravedduring his tenure as governor ofWashington Territory, 1887-1889.

Fight for Control of the WaterfrontTwo other critical problems impinged upon waterfront development. One problemwas the city’s hilly terrain, the other the need to connect Lake Washington to the sound ateither Elliott Bay or Shilshole Bay. To connect the lake to Elliott Bay, a trench could be dugthrough Beacon Hill; the displaced earth could be dumped onto the tidal flats, which thencould be developed for industrial and commercial use. Or the connection could be made bydigging a canal from Lake Washington to Lake Union, from Lake Union to Salmon Bay,and from Salmon Bay to either Smith Cove on Elliott Bay or Shilshole Bay. This optionwould require a lock to equalize the water level between the Sound and the lakes.Before 1890 several civic leaders favored the canal from Lake Washington toShilshole Bay. Among these leaders were Seattle’s founding father, Arthur A. Denny;Governor McGraw; Thomas Burke; and Burke’s father-in-law, John J. McGilvra. Such acanal would enable them to build a steel mill in Kirkland and would provide a route forfloating log rafts and transporting coal from the east side of Lake Washington. Burke’sSeattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad had been built in part to transport some of thesecommodities. However, in 1893 Eugene Semple, a former Washington Territory governor13Eugene Semple’s earliest dredging and tidelands reclamation work (1895-97) is revealed in Andres Wilse’s 1898panorama from Beacon Hill. First Avenue extends south (from the right) into the center of the scene on madeland, which replaced a timber trestle. The industrial clutter of the tidelands south of King Street includes othersmaller fill sites, left and right, as well as the great wooden “wall” of the Northern Pacific railroad trestle and itswarehouses that curves from the base of Beacon Hill through the center of the scene to the central waterfront.

14 Part OneCourtesy of Special Collections,University of Washington LibrariesSouth Canal contributions to the tideflats spew fromEugene Semple’s flumes.who promoted a south route throughBeacon Hill, had secured passage ofa bill allowing private companies toconstruct public waterways across stateownedproperty and to charge lienson reclaimed tideland that was sold tofinance the work. Governor McGraw hadblindly signed the bill, not realizing itfavored the Beacon Hill route. Not untilSemple filed plans with the WashingtonState Lands Commission for a competingland scheme did the implications becomeapparent to McGraw.With the blessing of the chamber of commerce, Semple lined up his financialbackers. A mass meeting of four thousand, headed by the mayor, brought in $500,000 insubscriptions. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) hailed the event as “one of the greatepochs in the history of Seattle.” Work began on 29 July 1895. By May 1896 almost onehundred acres of the tidal flats had been filled, most of it with mud dredged and drainedduring the building of the East Waterway. Sales of the newly created waterfront kept pacewith this earthmoving activity. Burke and the GN, fearing that Semple would succeed ingetting federal funds at the expense of their north canal route, filed an injunction whilechallenging the constitutionality of the 1893 law. For eighteen months Semple’s canalproject was halted while the state supreme court decided the case.Although the law’s constitutionality was upheld, Semple experienced severefinancial difficulties, even losing the backing of his St. Louis nephews Edgar and HenryAmes. (Edgar would later reap immense profits in shipbuilding at Harbor Island duringthe Great War.) Over Burke’s protests Semple reorganized his firm, the Seattle and LakeWashington Waterway Company,and got a four-year extension ofhis contract to fill the tidal flats.Burke, while failing to get a billthrough the legislature terminatingthe south canal project, did getan injunction preventing anyrailroad-owned tideland west ofthe dead end of Hanford Streetfrom being filled in. And whilethe injunction was in effect,Burke and his allies gatheredenough financial support to diga ten-foot-deep channel betweenShilshole and Salmon baysand received approval from thechamber of commerce to lowerCourtesy of Special Collections, University of Washington LibrariesSome of the trestlework used for the distribution of dirt onto thetideflats during the attempts at digging a “south canal” to LakeWashington. A portion of the Rainier Brewery is evident on thefar right.

Fight for Control of the WaterfrontLake Washington’s water level. Burke then negotiated the termination of the injunction,effective May 1901. The public’s patience with Semple’s project was growing thin and waslost altogether when officials discovered that all the water that Semple had been using tosluice away Beacon Hill was being sold to him at what seemed suspiciously cheap rates.The scent of corruption spread.The chamber of commerce then sent the editor of the P-I, Erastus Brainerd, in January1902 to Washington, D.C. Brainerd had earned the respect of the business community forhis key role in publicizing the city’s indispensable connection to Alaska for gold seekersand the wider economic benefits that would follow the gold rush. He was credited also withestablishing the U.S. Assay Office 14 in Seattle. Brainerd was to lobby for appropriationsfor a north canal. Semple followed Brainerd to the nation’s capital to voice his opposition,and then Burke decided to go as well to support Brainerd at the hearings. Burke carried theday by falsely informing the congressional committee that the law authorizing the southcanal had been declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court. Burke, accustomedto intoning righteously, convinced the committee of his truthfulness. Its authorization of$160,000 for the north canal doomed Semple.Closing in for the kill, Burke boasted to the GN’s general manager, John F. Stevens,in September 1902 that he could buy Semple out for a mere $6,000. Doing so, he said, would“prevent the disordering of the waterway across our tide lands on the South of our terminalgrounds . . . and this at a cost to the three railway companies that would be a bagatelle incomparison with the advantages to be gained.” Stevens spoke to Hill immediately and thentelegraphed Burke: “Close at once for control Seattle Lake Washington waterway per yourmessage ninth.”Semple had nevertheless almost completed the East Waterway at the mouth ofthe Duwamish River, and work on the West Waterway had begun in August 1903, pavingthe way for the later development of Harbor Island. However, the demand for reclaimedtidal flats outstripped Semple’s financial resources, forcing him to pledge future revenueto secure credit to continuethe reclamation work. In theprocess he surrendered most ofhis stock and ultimately controlof his reclamation project. Newmanagement stopped work onthe south canal, concentratinginstead on filling in the tidal flats.The railroads filled in their ownlands. A grand jury investigationinto the suspicious water contractled to the City issuing a stop-workCourtesy of Special Collections, University of Washington LibrariesWhile Eugene Semple filled a few acres on the tideflats with thediggings from his canal, he also left this scar. The ca. 1902 viewlooks west through what is now S. Columbia Way where it descendsin a curve from Beacon Hill to connect with both Interstate 5 andthe Spokane Street Viaduct.15order on Semple’s canal in May1904. The area around BeaconHill became Seattle’s industrialheartland. And the railroadsreaped revenue from servicing

16 Part OneCourtesy, The Rainier ClubErastus Brainerd from the RainierClub’s “mug book” of members.grain elevators, flour mills, steel plants, coal docks, toolmakingand machinery plants, and shipyards that locatedthere during the first two decades of the century.Topping off this revenue were the City’s landgrants to the GN and NP in exchange for their promises tobuild a union depot. These critically placed landholdings,adjacent to or near the railroad tracks, allowed the Hillinterests to negotiate tie-in contracts with shippers andwarehouse operators as a condition of sale of theseproperties. From its dominant position on the waterfront,the GN also controlled wharfage rates, threatening anycompetitor who charged or might charge rates lower thanthe GN did. The GN’s abuse of this power eventually ledeven the chamber of commerce in 1911 to join publicownership forces in opposing the railroad companies’domination of the waterfront by supporting legislationfor the establishment of port districts. It took the smell ofanticipated profits to be made from the opening of the Panama Canal to turn these railwaysupporters into opponents. How this conflict played out will be covered later in relation tothe Harbor Island–Bogue Plan controversy.It should be noted that it was common for railroads to demonstrate politicalpower during this period. In league with timber interests, railroad companies dominatedthe politics of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The GN and NP (both controlled by Hill) aloneheld power in the Dakotas, and they joined with the mining interests to control politics inMontana and Idaho. The Southern Pacific dominated California’s politics and directed itseconomy, especially in Southern California. In Oregon the locally owned Oregon SteamNavigation Company gained control of Columbia River traffic in the 1860s. And after thetransportation magnate Ben Holladay gained control of coastal traffic with his Pacific MailLine, he established the Oregon and California Railroad and dominated river traffic onIn 1898 the U.S. Assay Officemoved into a two-story cast-ironand masonry building on First Hill,built in 1886 by Post-Intelligencerowner Thomas Prosch for officesand a ballroom. It was the job of theAssay Office employees, posinghere, to determine a fair price forthe gold and silver brought throughSeattle by miners so that the U.S.Government might purchase it.After the Assay Office moved tothe new Immigration Building in1932 this, its first Seattle home at619 Ninth Avenue, was renovatedinto the German House.

Fight for Control of the Waterfrontthe Willamette River. Holladay’s domination of both Oregon transportation and Oregonpolitics ended with the collapse of his financial empire in 1873, though the transportationnetwork that he established was extended later by others.That railroads became prime targets first of the Grangers, then the Populists,and finally the Progressives of the early twentieth century is not surprising. The railroadcompanies, allied with the business elite of whatever communities their lines passedthrough, stood in the way of substantially all political reform. Passage of the Hepburn Actin 1906 finally gave the Interstate Commerce Commission the regulatory authority overrailway practices that it had previously lacked.As to the GN and NP, together they purchased the Burlington Railroad system in1901 in order to secure a connection to the Chicago hub and to stabilize the transcontinentalrail business along the northern tier. Known as the Northern Securities Company, thismonopoly could charge whatever rates the traffic would bear; its stock was consideredby the U.S. Attorney General Philander Knox to be thirty percent water. This monopolywas but a climax to the railroad reorganizations that the J. P. Morgan interests, in alliancewith Hill, had been involved in since 1896, when the NP drifted into receivership. StuartDaggett, in his classic study on these reorganizations, notes that the NP was dominated bythe Morgan-Hill interests since that time.17Anders Wilse’s 1898 view of the tideflats may be compared to this 1914 record of the same neighborhood. Here,sixteen years later, both Fourth and Sixth Avenues cross the new industrial district, although temporarily ontrestles. The view from Beacon Hill looks due west to Robert Moran’s former shipyard. The long shed fromwhich the Nebraska was launched ten years earlier is profiled against Elliott Bay. Above it, the popular Luna Parksprawls above the tidelands off of Duwamish head. The Centennial Mill, one of the early opportunists on thetideflats, is included on the far left.

18 Part OneProsecuted under the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Northern Securities Company wasordered dissolved by the federal court; the decision was later upheld by the U.S. SupremeCourt. However, during this period, Hill, while excluding Edward Henry Harriman’s UnionPacific from the Northern Securities deal, agreed with Harriman to respect the monopoly ofeach in the Pacific Northwest: Union Pacific would not enter Washington, and Hill’s lineswould not enter Oregon. Hill’s virtual monopoly in Washington led to the Pacific CoastLumber Manufacturers’ Association charging the GN with restraint of trade before theInterstate Commerce Commission in 1907. Not all was harmonious among the businesselite—many businesses considered freight and wharfage rates to be discriminatorilyexorbitant. Occasionally they would ally against the railroad companies, seeking to havethem regulated through state railroad commissions. Such a commission was not legislatedin Washington until a GN partisan, Albert E. Mead, was elected governor in 1904. Meadthen appointed a compliant commission subservient to railroad interests.Seeding of the Municipal Ownership MovementSeattle’s hills impeded commercial and industrial development. And as the 1889fire demonstrated, the city needed a permanent and dependable water supply. Reginald H.Thomson, who served as city engineer from 1892 to 1911, tackled both of these issues.Thomson preferred municipal ownership of utilities. He also planned to connect thedowntown with sections of the city that its hills segregated. Downtown Seattle neededlinkage with outlying areas: Interbay, Ballard, and the Lake Union basin to the north; RainierValley to the southeast; and the tideland to the south. Thomson opposed the erection of anypermanent structures in the way of these planned linkages and successfully prevented thecity council from granting a franchise to the GN when that would have blocked First AvenueSouth and closed streets leading south between First and Fifth avenues. He convinced Hillto tunnel under that section instead.Harry Chadwick, publisher of the weekly Argus, viewed Thomson, however, assubservient to Hill, charging that he gave Hill tunnel rights without specifying a route; thathe helped Hill oppose the NP’s earlier attempts to enter the city; and that he obstructedthe NP’s efforts to gain unrestricted access to its own docks. Chadwick also charged thatThomson was instrumental in the city council’s granting of franchises in exchange forunfulfilled promises to build a decent depot and that he hampered the council in its effortsto establish a union depot. Even the chamber of commerce complained about the GN’smiserable depot facility, an “embarrassment” to a city of almost one hundred thousand. Notuntil 1906 would the city finally get its long-sought union depot, the King Street Station,which was rivaled five years later by E. H. Harriman’s Union Station, barely one city blockaway.Thomson constructed Westlake Avenue to connect the downtown with the LakeUnion basin, cut Dearborn Avenue through the north end of Beacon Hill to link the downtownwith Rainier Valley, and laid out Magnolia Way to connect the downtown with Interbayand Ballard. The downtown itself underwent continual regrading, though not withouteditorial outcry. Harry Chadwick complained regularly about the contractors’ prolonged

Seeding of the Municipal Ownership Movementabandonment of work while citizens suffered through the dust and dirt of summers only toslog through muck and mud in the rainy seasons. Chadwick suspected that a contractors’combine was the cause. Colonel Alden J. Blethen, publisher of The Seattle Times, feudedcontinuously with Thomson, as he did with other advocates of moral reform and publicownership of utilities.In laying out his plans for the City’s control of its water supply, Thomson expandedupon the ideas of his predecessor, Frederick H. Whitworth. Whitworth saw the Cedar Riverwatershed as the key to Seattle’s development, believing it an ideal source of water fordrinking, firefighting, flushing sewage, and generating hydroelectric power. Though thelast was considered possible at the time, it remained subordinate to the other needs untilafter the turn of the century. The United States was only beginning to use electric powerin the 1890s. An examination of this early use provides the context for one of the titanicpolitical struggles of early twentieth-century Seattle: private versus public ownership ofutilities.David E. Nye, in hisbook on electrification in theUnited States, points out that before1910 electrification had beenkeyed to commercial and industrialusers, not domestic users.Most homes had not been wired:only one in seven homes had electricityby 1910. Commercial andstreet lighting consumed most ofthe investment capital, as a warypeople were being introducedto the wonders of electricity. By1900 street railways had becomeelectrified across the country.Many of these lines became un-19City Engineer R. H. Thomson is both picturedand characterized in Frank Calvert’s 1911book, The Cartoon, A Reference book ofSeattle’s Successful Men With Decorationsby the Seattle Cartoonist’s Club. While thephotograph is not credited, the artist whogot the Thomson assignment was John Ross“Dok” Hager, a dentist turned cartoonist.Beginning in 1909, Dok’s cartoon take-offson the eccentric Robert W. Patten, Seattle’seccentric “Umbrella Man,” was a regularand popular feature in The Seattle Times.Turning his hand this time to the formidableThomson, “Dok” has the city engineerrolling up his right sleeve for a little “handywork” on the disrespectful satirist himself.To the side is a photograph of the “UmbrellaMan” himself.

20 Part Oneprofitable as they were extended to serve the outlying communities being promoted bydevelopers. Seattle’s expansion outward was but a lesser version of the extreme real-estatepromotions in Southern California. Mergers of the weaker with the stronger street railwaysbecame common in Seattle and other cities.As elsewhere, when Seattle developers subdivided properties to sell lots they neededto guarantee access to downtown. Street railway companies had to be induced to build linesto the suburbs. When they did the ridership moreoften than not proved too little to pay expenses,and the firms passed into receivership. Morethan a dozen of these independent lines operatedunder city franchises in the 1890s. During theDepression most used capital that was supposedto be reserved for maintenance to operate. Thispractice led to the deterioration of what werealready poorly constructed trolley systems. Inthis setting the Stone and Webster ManagementCorporation of Boston had the banker JacobFurth apply in 1899 for a forty-year franchise toconsolidate four such streetcar lines. Stone andWebster was representing two eastern investmentfirms: Lee, Higginson and Company and Kidder,Peabody and Company. The firm also heldGeneral Electric securities issued earlier by thefour companies to pay for equipment they hadpurchased. On 12 May 1899 the companiessigned escrow deeds.On 9 March 1900, a blanket forty-yearfranchise was granted to Furth and his partner,J. D. Lowman. However, a citizens’ group, theCommittee of 100, led by James Allen Smith ofthe University of Washington, argued successfullyto shorten the life of the franchise to thirty-fiveyears, to make the new firm provide free transfersto riders, and to allow riders the option of buyingtickets in lots of one hundred or more at a twenty-Most of the community of squatters that held to the bluff andbeach below Denny Hill since the early 1890s were evicted forthe opening of the north portal to the railroad tunnel boredbeneath the central business district. The work began on AprilFools Day, 1903, when cannons shooting Cedar River waterfrom the municipal system first attacked the bank. The rocksthat could not be carried away on the flood were blasted. Anestimated 500 thousand cubic yards of dirt was removed fromthe tunnel by a crew that sometimes numbered 1,000, and muchof the dirt was used as fill along the waterfront, although thistime not for squatters.

Top: The first railroad depot at the foot ofColumbia Street was quickly rebuilt followingthe “Great Fire of 1889.” With additions thenew station eventually stretched nearly as farsouth as Yesler Way, and it is from Yesler thatit is seen here. This inelegant station wasan embarrassment to Seattle’s cosmopolitanambitions. Coaches on passenger trains wouldregularly unload visitors onto the splinteredplanks and puddles of Railroad Avenue blocksaway from the depot. After sunset the poorlylighted waterfront was a hazard for anyone andespecially for unprepared visitors.Bottom: First the King Street Station in1906 and five years later the Union Pacific’sWashington-Oregon Depot one block to theeast on Jackson Street twice fulfilled localsexpectations for a grand transportation temple.In this view Harriman’s Union Depot is on theleft and James Hill’s King Street station with itsVenetian tower is to the right.Westlake Avenue was cut throughfrom Pike Street and Fourth Avenuein 1906, repeating a connection madethirty-five years earlier by a narrowgaugedrailroad that through most ofthe 1870s delivered coal from scowson Lake Union to the Pike Street CoalWharf. This view dates from 1909when Fourth Avenue, on the left, stillclimbed Denny Hill, but for less thantwo years more. By 1911 the modesthill’s Fourth Avenue “summit” nearBlanchard Street would be loweredeighty-five feet with the DennyRegrade.21five percent discount. In addition, the councilwas persuaded to regulate fares and to establishminimum-wage scales. The new firm was namedthe Seattle Electric Company (SEC) until 1912,when it became the Puget Sound Traction, Powerand Light Company. Thomas Burke, Furth, andfour other prominent citizens were on the SEC’sboard of directors.If there was an improvement in service,the Argus did not recognize it. Suspectingcollusion between the council and the SEC,Chadwick claimed, “The whole system is rottento the core . . . [and needs] complete revision.”Overcrowding, erratic service, and open cars,even in winter, were still typical. “This is notwhat the Seattle Electric Company promisedwhen they were given their present franchise,”Chadwick declared. When the company wasgranted an exclusive franchise over the Westlakeroute in 1905, north-end community organizationscomplained so loudly that a common-user clausewas inserted into the agreement. Charges offavoritism were raised again that year whenthe council loaded down the franchise terms soheavily for the developer James A. Moore, whohad applied for a street railway franchise, that hebacked out. Notice should be taken of these northendorganizations. They were operated primarilyby middle-class women and would soon form analliance as the North End Federated Clubs. Thisgroup became one of the main components ofthe municipal ownership coalition. Among itsCourtesy, Old Seattle Paperworks

22 Part Oneleadership were two women who wouldgain elective office during the 1920s:Bertha Knight Landes would be electedto the city council and the mayorship,Kathryn Miracle to the council.Turning to the generation anddistribution of electric power, we learnmore about how the public came tofavor municipal ownership of electricalutilities. The state supreme court set thestage when it ruled in 1895 (Winston v.Spokane) that a city could issue revenuebonds that were to be exclusive of generalobligation bonds. After this decision,the city council passed a new waterordinance, which the mayor vetoed. Thecouncil then submitted a $1.25 millionThe carving of no other Seattle regrade is so evident.The 108-foot deep notch at Dearborn Street was cutwith the daily blast of six million gallons of water. Thehydraulics began in the fall of 1909 and ended three yearslater and the Twelfth Avenue South Bridge opened in thefall of 1912. The Dearborn Cut converted more than amillion yards of glacial hardpan into mud that was thendistributed on the tideflats and sold by Ralph Dearborn,namesake for both the regrade and the street.water bond issue to the voters in December, which they approved 2,656 to 1,665. Next thecouncil successfully lobbied the 1897 legislature for the authority to issue revenue bondsjust as the economy was rebounding at the onset of the Yukon gold rush, which improvedthe marketability of the bonds.The Snoqualmie Falls Power Company applied for an electrical franchise in 1898,but the council imposed terms on the franchise that the company judged would inhibit bondsales. Enter the Washington Power and Transmission Company, whose engineers wereCharles Stone and Edwin Webster. This company had purchased land at Cedar Lake from theSeattle Electric Company— land that was strategically located for power development. Toprevent the city from contracting with the Washington Power and Transmission Company,the Snoqualmie Falls Power Company enjoined the city. In August 1899, R. H. Thomsonrecommended that Seattle acquire Cedar Lake; a resolution was passed, followed by anordinance on 31 January 1900 forcing the Washington Power and Transmission Companyto sell its lands to the city or face condemnation proceedings and the exercise of the rightof eminent domain.As completion of the Cedar River dam approached,even the chamber of commerce alleged that a city-owned plantcould provide cheaper electricity than the SEC. The SeattleManufacturers’ Association, established in 1900 to promotelocal industry and to combat unions, urged the city to get intothe power business in order to drive down electric rates and toextend and improve services. In hopes of breaking up the SEC’smonopoly, the Municipal Ownership League was organized inThis caricature of Jacob Furth appeared first in the Argus and later in a collectionof Argus cartoons titled, Men Behind the Seattle Spirit. Showing flip or having funwith the “Mighty Furth” the book’s own caption reads, in part, “President of theSeattle Electric Co., president of the Puget Sound National Bank, and president ofa lot of other things.”

Seeding of the Municipal Ownership MovementCourtesy, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.preparation for the 1902 city election. The league got a proposition on the ballot that wouldauthorize the construction of a generating plant at Cedar Falls. The Argus claimed, “Nomore important question is to come before the people . . . than that of a municipal lightingplant (Yesler Substation)”. The proposition won overwhelmingly, by 6,697 votes.Thomson, however, felt the sting of Chadwick’s lash over a series of transactionsbefore construction of the plant was completed in 1905. Chadwick taunted Thomson fortardiness in conducting preliminary surveys, for not indicating that more than street lightingwould be provided, and even more bitingly for awarding the electrical equipment contractto General Electric, despite a lower bid from an established local manufacturer. Chadwickaccused Thomson of “working hand in glove” with Stone and Webster, which had ties toGeneral Electric, as noted earlier.Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the SEC dropped its electric rates in October1904 from twenty cents to twelve cents per kilowatt-hour. This still fell short of the city’sprospective residential rate of eight cents per kilowatt-hour. The SEC steadily lost customersto the city: 197 from October toDecember 1906 and 233 fromJanuary to May 1907. CityLight was up and running, andit continued to set the yardstickfor electrical rates for the nexthalf century. Nevertheless, theSEC and its successors manageduntil 1920 to retain sixty-five toseventy-five percent of its powercustomers and its private powerallies in the downtown businessarea.Faced with a nationwidemovement against absenteeownership, the trade association23Here are some of the urbane fruitsof the gold rush. The scene looksnorth on First Avenue towards itsbusy intersection with MadisonStreet. The three elegant andnearly new buildings on the left,historically the Globe and Beebebuildings and the Hotel Cecil, areall 1901 creations of the architectMax Umbrecht. A cable car onMadison Street heads throughthe intersection and beyond it arethree Seattle Electric Companytrolleys and a few wagons. At thistime the motorcar in Seattle wasstill a rarity. Ordinarily one eitherwalked or took a trolley.Ed Duffy, the young electrical engineer who helped J.D. Ross wirethe city’s first generator, made this early photograph of City Light’stimber crib dam on the Cedar River.

24 Part Oneof the industry, the National Electric Light Association(NELA), began lobbying for the establishment of stateregulatory commissions to prevent municipalities fromconstructing their own electrical plants and distributionsystems. Douglas Anderson, in his Regulatory Politicsand Electric Utilities, convincingly documents NELA’scampaign to make state regulation the alternative tomunicipal ownership. By 1904 the Chicago utilitiesmagnate Samuel Insull was able to convince a majorityof NELA members of the wisdom of this tactic. NELA’sbasic tenet was as follows: “Public regulation andcontrol, if efficient, removes the necessity or excuse formunicipal ownership. . . . If public regulation shall fail toestablish good understanding between the corporationsoperating public utilities and the customers of thosecorporations, we shall inevitably have a revival of thecry for municipal ownership.”If any ambiguity remained, NELA cleared theair: “If state commissions be constituted, they shouldbe appointed in that manner which will give them thegreatest freedom from local and political influences.”From generators beside the CedarRiver the City Light current traveledforty miles to the municipally ownedutility’s first distribution station atSeventh Avenue and Yesler Way. At45,000 volts the operation set a recordwith its transmission voltage.Key to eliminating municipal competition would be the enactment of a certificate-ofnecessitylaw. Under such a law, any municipality that chose to erect its own electric plantwould have to demonstrate to the regulatory agency that a necessity for one existed. If theregulatory body were properly under control, as noted in NELA’s protocol, certificationwould be denied. When the Washington State Railroad Commission was expanded to coverutilities in 1911, becoming the Washington State Public Service Commission, municipallyowned utilities were exempted from its jurisdiction, to the dismay of the private utilities.Consequently, the private utilities repeatedly sought legislation requiring certificates ofnecessity; when they won this legislation, the voters rejected it by referendum, as we shallsee, in 1916 and in 1922.Industrial RelationsIndustrial relations were also transformed during these early years. The variousbusinesses already referred to necessarily had to employ workers. How the firms paid themand under what conditions they were to work affected profits. Ideally, businesses would getmaximum productivity at the lowest possible cost. How a business achieved this dependedheavily on its negotiations with its employees. If it could set the terms of employment bybargaining with each employee individually the firm had maximum advantage, particularlyif the skill being sought was in abundance. This advantage would sometimes lead todictatorial control of the workplace, sometimes to a benevolent paternalism, and sometimesto some other accommodation. If the employees joined together in a union, the firm would

Industrial Relations 25have to bargain with that collective entity. Which side would have the advantage dependedon each side’s relative strengths and the labor market.During the first two decades of the century, industrial relations in Seattle werecolored by the struggle between employers and unions. The employers aimed for the openshop (an establishment in which union membership is not a condition of employment),and the unions sought the closed shop (in which union membership was a condition ofemployment). The unions hoped to achieve the closed shop first by being recognized bythe employers as the bargaining agent. To gain this recognition unions usually staged astrike, and the employers just as often applied to the courts for an injunction prohibiting thestrike, which was usually granted. When labor was in short supply and employers neededworkers, unions were usually recognized as the bargaining agent without a strike.Before focusing on Seattle, we should review the status of industrial relations ingeneral at the turn of the century. After the Civil War, a “second American revolution” wasunleashed as industrialization progressed free of the political hindrances imposed by theslave states of the antebellum period. Prevented by the southern states from being charteredbefore the war, the transcontinental railroads were finally freed during the war, beginningwith land grants to the Union Pacific in 1862 and the Northern Pacific in 1864. Otherregional roads also received land grants. The grant to the Texas and Pacific in March 1871was the last given to a trans-Mississippi road. A total of more than 180 million acres of landpassed into railroad hands, of which more than 100 million acres were finally sold. (Forcomparison, Washington State covers 68,126 square miles or 43,600,640 acres.)Railroad construction proved the catalyst for industrial expansion after the war,as the automotive industry would in the 1920s. The steel industry, marked by crucialtechnological changes, responded to these market demands, as did machine tooling, coalmining, and ancillary industries. The electrical industry took off in the 1880s with GeneralElectric and Westinghouse absorbing smaller firms along with their patents, a processthat eventually brought the two firms together in 1895 in a patent pool—a duopoly. Theunprecedented demand for capital to finance this growth brought the modern corporationinto full flower, as it did banking houses on Wall Street and Boston’s State Street, whereStone and Webster had its headquarters. Absentee ownership came to characterize largescalebusiness operations. Corporations in the same field often combined to control pricesand production, to limit competition as much as possible, and to counter union organizingby shifting production from a troubled plant to an untroubled one and by sharing lists oftroublesome employees—blacklists. In Seattle the Great Northern and the Seattle ElectricCompany were the most prominent corporations. The latter company became commonlyknown as the Boston Syndicate because it was owned by the Boston-based Stone andWebster. To many citizens such businesses seemed less concerned about the publicwelfare than locally owned firms. Newcomers, arriving with high expectations, joined theopponents of absentee ownership. The nucleus of the reform movement was created bythese conditions.The general status of industrial relations in Seattle at the century’s beginning wascharacterized by the state labor commissioner, William Blackman, at a 1903 chamber ofcommerce gathering to celebrate the city’s birthday:

26 Part One[N]ow all the trades are organized and a large percentage of workingmen and women are within the ranks. Today Seattle has about seventyfivedifferent labor organizations, with a membership of between six andseven thousand. . . . The workers, through their organizations, advocateshortening the hours of labor so that they may improve their minds inkeeping with the progress of the age. They are striving in turn to save fromtheir earnings something for a home. Statistics gathered by the State LaborBureau show that two-sixths of the wage earners own their own homes.This being the condition, such citizens must be given credit for being afactor in the community. The workers are taking an interest in legislation.. . . They are interested in passing good laws for the upbuilding of ourgovernment and the preservation of the home. They have learned that thestrike and boycott are fast growing to be a thing of the past.In this statement we note the upward mobility of wage earners, their desire foreducation, their growing interest in social reform legislation, and the ameliorative roleat this time of the chamber of commerce. The neutral position of the chamber on theopen shop–closed shop issue was indicated in 1904,when the Seattle Manufacturers’ Association invitedthe organization to join its Citizens’ Alliance to combatunionization. The chamber responded by recommendingcreation of a sixty-member congress: thirty membersrepresenting labor unions and thirty representing theemployers. The resolution was tabled, but the chambermoved gradually into the open shop camp by 1914.When William Pigott opened his Seattle Steel rolling mill in 1905 theRailway and Marine News called it “the beginning of a new industrialepoch.” Within the year The Seattle Times named it “Seattle’s LittlePittsburgh.” Instead, Pigott borrowed the name of another Ohio steeltown for this neighborhood between Pigeon Point and West Seattle. Hecalled it Youngstown. By 1910, a likely date for this view of his mill,Pigott was regularly called “Seattle’s greatest industrialist.” After hisdeath in 1929, the plant was sold to Bethlehem Steel and much later,in 1991, Birmingham Steel acquired what survives as the region’s laststeel mill.Courtesy, Bill Burden

Industrial RelationsThe “strike and boycott,” however, were coming more fully into play; theseactions were the only means left for organized labor to combat the open shop drive of manyemployers once negotiations and mediation had failed. Before the American Federation ofLabor (AFL) penetrated the region in 1902, another federation, the Western Central LaborUnion, represented individual unions. It had been formed from the remnants of the Knightsof Labor and several small miner and maritime unions. Like the AFL the Western CentralLabor union was oriented to lobbying, assisting its craft members in bargaining whencalled upon, gaining the cooperation of other unions in sympathy strikes, and organizingboycotts. It also settled disputes between unions that might lay claim to the same craft, asoccurred in a 1902 maritime strike in which the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific contested thejurisdiction of the International Longshoremen’s Association. This kind of jurisdictionaldispute was less apt to happen when unions were organized on an industry-wide basis, aswere the steel and automobile industries in the 1930s. In these industries, several craftswere represented by a single elected bargaining agent.When the Populist platform of 1897 failed to be enacted, the Western Central LaborUnion joined other organizations to form the State Labor Congress. Soon the congressdecided it needed a voice to justify unions to the public and to report stories that the othernewspapers neglected to print—stories of special relevance to working people that wereobjectively reported. It started the Seattle Union Record, a weekly, in 1900.The establishment of the Socialist Party of Washington in 1900 was an additionalindicator of labor unrest and of the perceived need for social and political reform. HarryAult, publisher of the Union Record, was himself an outspokenSocialist. Given the economic revival, the time seemed ripe toset up a broader labor organization. So inspired, the State LaborCongress founded the Washington State Federation of Labor in1902, affiliating it with the AFL. To prepare for the 1903 legislativesession, the federation joined with the Washington State Grange,middle-class reformers, clergymen dedicated to social causes,and the Washington Federation of Women’s Clubs. Together theywon passage of several pieces of reform legislation: a child laborlaw, an eight-hour day statute for employees working on publicprojects, and an initiative law.Highlighting labor unrest at the time of the legislativesession was a 162-day maritime strike against the Pacific CoastSteamship Company over overtime pay. The strike ended with thedefeat of the longshoremen in February 1903. Violence had flaredup when strikebreakers were brought inand housed and fed on a steamer drawnup dockside. In March the Seattle ElectricCompany announced a wage cut forits streetcar employees, who were paidtwenty cents an hour and worked ten anda half hours a day, seven days a week,with time off if requested in advance.27Courtesy,University of WashingtonLibraries, Special Collections.Harry Ault, publisher of theSeattle Union RecordIn 1918 the Seattle Union Record became a daily and wasthe first daily labor newspaper in the nation.

28 Part OneThat a strike quickly followed on 25 March should not be surprising. That it was lost sixdays later, however, might be a surprise, but as we read on it should be less so.All this inspired Jacob Furth of the Seattle Electric Company to form the Citizens’Alliance with the Seattle Manufacturers’ Association in 1904 to “oppose the spread of theunion shop, boycotts, and picketing.” As to the Seattle Electric Company, it had “insidemen” to inform on union activity. The SEC reported to the Boston office in April 1904 that“Scott of Trainmen’s Union No. 1” had complained of the pressure he was under for nottaking in new members. The Seattle office then reported: “I told him not to worry about thisas the course he was pursuing was to my mind the only proper one at this time. He had anucleus of an organization and immediately on trouble showing up it would be a very easymatter to get to work and forestall it.”The Seattle Electric Company was furthered in its cause by Mayor Richard A.Ballinger. The SEC reported to the Boston office that Ballinger was willing to “create anemergency force which could be called upon in time of strikes, riots, or other disturbances.. . . The mayor expressed himself willing to appoint as special policemen without pay suchmen as I might recommend among our employees, who would serve in that capacity on andabout the premises of the company. . . . I agreed that this was right.”Surrounded by strikers and crowded by a team and wagon, a southbound Seattle Electric trolley is stopped onSecond Avenue in front of the Bon Marché in a scene from the 1903 trolley strike. The view looks north from nearUnion Street.

City Politics 1900-1904: The Traditional PeriodFor its part the Western Central Labor union reorganized to better meet the openshoppers. In 1905 it became the Seattle Central Labor Council (SCLC), and its most militantadvocate was James A. Duncan (known as Jimmy), a machinist and secretary of the council.The council’s constitution provided for the creation of trade section committees, stoppingjust short of authorizing the formation of industrial unions. Sections were established for thebuilding, metal, maritime, printing, amusement, and brewing trades and for miscellaneoustrades. Before 1925, the SCLC supported the industrial form of labor organization, not theAFL craft form. This stance put the SCLC at odds with the Washington State Federation ofLabor and embarrassed the state federation’s leadership. This tension between the SCLCand the federation would persist until 1925.29City Politics, 1900–1904: The Traditional PeriodWhen covering the 1911 recall election for McClure’s Magazine, Burton J.Hendrick wrote that under Mayor Humes “there arose in Seattle a small coterie of tenderloincapitalists—men who cultivated vice intensively and organized it in a way to wring from itthe largest profits.” According to a recent report of the Federal Immigration Commission,he continued, Seattle was “one of the headquarters of the white slave trade.”Thomas J. Humes had become Seattle’s mayor in 1898 by default. William D. Woodhad been appointed mayor when the elected mayor, Frank Black, resigned upon discoveringthat his Republican Party had made promises he could not keep. But Wood caught goldfever and headed to the Klondike to recover. Humes had no qualms about keeping hisparty’s promises: establishing Seattle’s credentials as an open town and accommodatinggold seekers and those planning to live off them. Opening the town meant disjointing lawand order. Prostitution, gambling, and the whole panoply of vice rackets flourished underpolice protection. Humes’s first mayoral term left no doubt of what a second would bring.Yet, despite his record, when Humes facedreelection in 1900 the Argus’ Harry Chadwick foundhim preferable to any candidate the Democrats mightoffer and accused the candidate Will H. Parry of beingunder the control of Thomas Burke. The former senatorJohn L. Wilson, publisher of the P-I, backed Parry. Afterbeing bypassed for reelection as U.S. Senator, Wilsonhad appealed to James Hill for a loan to buy the P-I.Never one to shun an opportunity, Hill had lent Wilsonthe $400,000 needed, thereby adding Wilson and theCourtesy, The Rainier ClubOne-term Seattle mayor, 1904-1906, Richard Achilles Ballinger was laterappointed Secretary of the Interior by Preident. Howard Taft. Linkedto a scandal connected with Alaskan coal-land claims, the “Ballinger-Pinchot controversy,” Ballinger’s anti-conservationist views were firstrevealed in a series of Collier’s Weekly articles and later under crossexamination by congressional committee counsel Louis D. Brandeis.Ballinger resigned early in 1911, and the cloud associated with his timeas secretary contributed to Taft’s re-election defeat in 1912.

30 Part OneP-I to the already powerful Hill forces. A Populist–Democratfusion put on the ticket the assistant city engineer George F.Cotterill, a prohibitionist and single taxer, who had laid out thebicycle paths along the shores of Lake Washington, upon whichOlmsted Brothers, a landscape architecture firm, would soonbase the city’s boulevard system. Cotterill seemed strangelyout of place at this time. His time would come later, once thecitizens became fed up with all the corruption fostered by theopen town policy.Chadwick greeted Humes’s landslide victory as oneconfirming “a clean and honest businessmen’s administration.”He predicted, under Humes, that “gambling houses would bepermitted to run, and subject to restrictions, saloons must beproperly conducted, and the social evil will be restricted to certainsections and kept in as good control as possible.” “Social evil”was the euphemism for prostitution. Yesler Way was usuallyconsidered the boundary, or deadline: prostitution was allowedsouth of this street. However, the deadline was ever changing.Courtesy,University of WashingtonLibraries, Special Collections.James “Jimmy” A. Duncan,secretary of the CentralLabor Council of Seattle.As the tenderloin district shifted uptown, opposition to the city’s open town policy grewamong legitimate businesses as rents ballooned and pedestrian traffic decreased. Chadwickmust have been whistling in the dark. A crime wave ensued under the new police chief:outlawed slot machines reappeared in the same old saloons, and liquor sales to minorsincreased. The P-I fired away at Humes and then finally got the city council to pass aresolution to investigate vice conditions. Chadwick, converted, saw the light. “Thievesand pickpockets, burglars, toughs, thugs, etc. abound everywhere. Gambling houses areconnected by staircases with saloons . . . . Boys are often seen in saloons and gamblinghouses.” The police chief resigned and was replaced by William Meredith.Seattle Mayor ThomasD. Humes at his deskat City Hall, a.k.a. the“Kattzenjammer Kastle.”First appointed by thecity council in 1897 to fillthe term of Mayor W. D.Wood who had resigned,the Republican Humesthen won three full twoyearterms, 1898 through1903, for himself and hisopen town policies.

Lake Union’s Portage Bay appears to the left of thereposed cyclists in this turn-of-the-century scenephotographed on the bike trail to Lake Washington.Beyond the bay appears a part of the narrow Montlakeisthmus that seperates the two lakes.City Politics 1900-1904: The Traditional Period31Meredith was not about toreform the police department, however.And in the 23 March 1901 issue ofthe Seattle Republican, the AfricanAmerican publisher Horace RoscoeCayton Sr. accused him of tolerating,even promoting, graft in the policedepartment. The historian Richard Hobbsin The Cayton Legacy and Ed Diaz inhis biography of Cayton expanded uponEsther Mumford's early account ofCayton’s abrupt arrest that very night,when he was jailed and charged withcriminal libel. His friend, the bankerJames D. Hoge, bailed him out. The P-I’s publisher rallied to Cayton’s defense,helping to win over public opinion. Asensational trial ensued on 1 May. JohnConsidine, a theater owner and part owner of a saloon and gambling house, was the keywitness on Cayton’s behalf, claiming that Meredith fully participated in corruption. Noverdict was reached, and the judge discharged Cayton.Three days after the trial, the city council appointed a special committee to investigatethe charges of corruption. On 25 June 1901, Meredith stalked the Considine brothers nearYesler Way and Occidental Street, followed them into the G. O. Guy Drugstore, and fireda badly aimed shotgun blast at John. Tom then fractured Meredith’s skull as John shot thechief through the heart.Humes appointed John L. Sullivan police chief, and Considine, now freed fromMeredith’s heavy-handed enforcement, moved his box houses (saloons with theatersattached) north of the Yesler Way deadline. At the LakeWashington resorts—Madison, Madrona, and Leschiparks—liquor continued to be sold illegally (at outletscalled blind pigs) because the city council refusedto establish a licensing policy. As the 1902 mayoralelection approached, the Argus endorsed Humes onceagain, this time because his election would mean“defeat of the corrupt railroad ring who have attemptedto dictate in their interests the politics of the city andthe state.” (At this time there was growing support forbringing the railroads under regulatory control.)By 1903 the city council even issued licensesto saloons as far north as Pike Street, about a halfmilenorth of the deadline. Next came the box housesto accommodate the social evil that a grand jury soonfound was thriving under police protection. SullivanCourtesy, Esther MumfordHorace Roscoe Cayton Sr., publisherof the Seattle Republican.

32 Part Onewas forced to resign, though Humes stood fast by his police chief despite the evidenceimplicating him. So flagrant had civic corruption become that a backlash brought theattorney Richard Ballinger to the mayor’s office in 1904. Ballinger promised to close theblind pigs in the parks. Even Chadwick endorsed Ballinger, despite his close links with“certain railroad interests.”Social Fabric of the CityAt the turn of the century, Seattle was a bustling, thoroughly disorganized city ofalmost one hundred thousand, if people merely passing through to Alaska were counted.Reputedly, there were more saloons than retail stores downtown. There was not sufficienthousing or hotel space for the newcomers. The transient population included not only thoseheaded for Alaska but also those who migrated seasonally to Seattle from the loggingcamps and mill towns, from the fisheries and canneries elsewhere on Puget Sound and inAlaska, and from eastern Washington after the end of the wheat harvest. Before 1916 thenumber of seasonally unemployed workers ranged between 10,000 and 15,000. Many ofthese seasonal residents fitted nicely into the city’s politics, often being paid by downtownward bosses to register and vote according to their instructions.Seattle grew from a town with a population of 80,671 in 1900 into a major citywith a population of 237,000 in 1910 and 315,312 in 1920. The populations of other PugetSound ports also increased markedly. Thirty miles to the south, Tacoma’s populationspurted from 37,714 in 1900 to 83,743 in 1910 and 96,965 in 1920. Thirty miles to thenorth, Everett’s population expanded from a mere 7,838 in 1900 to 24,814 in 1910 andcrept to 27,644 by 1920. The Northwest’s other coastal metropolis, Portland, experiencedcomparable population growth: it went from 46,385 people in 1890 to 90,426 in 1900,to 207,214 in 1910, and to 258,280 in 1920. When its downtown—on the west bank ofthe Willamette River—filled up, the neighborhoods to the east of the river absorbed theoverflow. Along the Pacific Coast, the three cities with the highest growth rates between1900 and 1910 were Los Angeles, at 212 percent; Seattle, at 194 percent; and Portland, atThe pavilion at Madison Park was oversizedwith room for 1,400 to enjoy all sorts oftheatre, including minstrel shows, farce,and musicals as well as other concerts,dancing, and the annual gathering ofPioneers to reminisce and pose togetheron its wide front steps. The “trolley park”was developed in 1890 at the end of theMadison Street cable railway as a lure forcitizens to ride the rails and also, perhaps,to purchase a home lot along the way. Whenpolitics allowed, the crowds that swarmedthese alluring destinations at Madison Park,Madrona Park, and Leschi Park could alsopurchase liquor and play games of chance.The pavilion stood for a quarter century untildestroyed by fire on 25 March, 1914.

Social Fabric of the City129 percent. San Francisco’s population growth rate had leveled off by 1900, increasing byonly twenty-one to twenty-five percent between 1900 and 1930. Seattle, Portland, and LosAngeles grew outward through the annexation of adjacent urban concentrations. However,as Seattle and Portland grew outward, they retained an organic connection with their cores.Los Angeles’s core had relatively little organic relationship to the neighboring communitiesthat real-estate developers and railway promoters had conjured. These communities wereself-contained.American-born whites made up seventy-five percent of Seattle’s populationduring the entire first two decades of the twentieth century. Most migrated to the city fromelsewhere in Washington State. The rest came mostly from Minnesota, followed by Illinois,Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. The Midwest supplied most of the out-of-state migrantsto the Pacific Coast during this period. Of Seattle’s in-migrants, fifty to sixty percent werebetween the ages of fifteen and forty-five, the prime of their productive lives.At the turn of the century, San Francisco was the dominant city on the PacificCoast, with a population that was twenty-one percent of the total population of all threecoastal states. It was the ninth largest city in the country. The Bay City had established itscommanding position much earlier and handled about ninety percent of the coast’s importsand exports. Its manufacturers produced about sixty percent of the commodities fabricatedon the coast. Its lumber companies controlled most of the mills in the Puget Sound basinbefore 1900. However, as the historian Robert Ficken observes in The Forested Land: A33With Seattle’s exhilarating growth in the early twentieth century the opportunity to inspect its far-flung attractionsfrom the spring seats of a “Seeing Seattle . . . Auto Car” could be had for one dear dollar. Since that was half ofwhat a streetcar employee was then paid for a ten hour working day these tourists were luxuriating. Regularlyphotographed as a group, many of these relatively affluent tourists would purchase a print either as a memento orpostcard of their adventure. Many of these cards survive. This one is stamped June 15, 1907.

34 Part OneHistory of Lumbering in Western Washington, the transcontinental railroads, most notablythe Great Northern and the Northern Pacific, were making steady inroads on the lumbershippingbusiness. Not only were they taking an increasing proportion of the businessfrom oceangoing vessels, but “the industry was no longer exclusively controlled fromSan Francisco [and] . . . decisions increasingly were made in offices in Tacoma, Seattle,and other local centers of lumbering.” This shift was a by-product of the decimation ofthe Midwest’s forests. Also, once the GN began trans-Pacific shipping, Seattle steadilychallenged San Francisco’s domination of the Asian trade.While it was the climate that attracted midwesterners to Southern California, it wasthe opportunity for jobs as well as business and professional careers that brought them to thePacific Northwest. People usually went to Southern California to retire and invest in largelyself-contained, self-defined communities that had originated as real estate promotions. Thiswas not the case in northern cities, as indicated by the sex ratios: in frontier towns andcities, males typically predominated over females. This was true of Seattle but not of LosAngeles and the rest of Southern California, where the female population almost equaledthe male population. In Seattle, males outnumbered females 166.8 to 100 in 1890. But theratio fell to 136 males to 100 females by 1910 and to 113.5 males to 100 females by 1920.By 1940 the ratio had become 99.3 males to 100 females.Courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special CollectionsWhen King County moved outof this old clapboard box in 1890and up to its new courthouse onFirst Hill (a.k.a. Profanity Hill)city government moved in. AndCity Hall stayed throughout mostof Seattle’s years of explosivegrowth. It coped—barely—byadding wings and floors in sucha haphazard way that the old boxbecame popularly known at the“Katzenjammer Kastle” after a thenpopular comic that featured similarstructures. In this 1909 view thecity’s new brick and steel city hallappears up Yesler Way, far right,and so the Katzenjammer’s daysas the center of city governmentare soon to pass. Although hardto read, postcard artist O.T. Fraschcaptioned this scene “Old and NewCity Hall Seattle.” The wider andearlier view of City Hall also showsthe hilltop King County Courthouseon the left horizon and at thecenter horizon the two towers ofCity Light’s substation on YeslerWay near Seventh Avenue.

Social Fabric of the City 35The proportion of foreign-born whites in Seattle was 30.7 percent in 1890, decliningto 23.1 percent in 1900, rising slightly to 25.7 percent in 1910, and dropping to 23.4 percentin 1920, 20 percent in 1930, and 16.2 percent in 1940. The foreign-born white populationof Portland steadily declined from a high of 28 percent in 1890 to a low of 16 percent by1930, while that of Los Angeles remained relatively constant: a high of 22 percent in 1890and 19 percent in 1920. Most of Seattle’s foreign-born whites originated from Englishspeakingcountries and from Europe. Most of the English speakers came from Canada.Norwegians and Swedes were the next largest group; migrants from England and Scotlandranked third. Italians numbered a mere 150 in 1890, but their population grew to 3,500 by1910.Non-whites made up a modest 1.9 percent of the population in 1890, in partbecause of the deportation of the Chinese population during the anti-Chinese riots of 1885to 1886. (This was before Japanese laborers had arrived in great numbers.) By 1900 theproportion of non-whites had grown to 4.8 percent, leveling off at four percent in 1910and 1920. By contrast, Portland’s non-white population was 10.8 percent in 1890 and 10.9percent in 1900. It dropped to four percent in 1910 and to 2.1 percent in 1920. The nonwhitepopulation of Los Angeles was 6.3 percent in 1890, 4.3 percent in 1900, 4.4 percentin 1910, and 5.2 percent in 1920.The Japanese were the most numerous of non-whites and performed much ofthe work that the displaced Chinese had previously done. The Japanese numbered 2,990in 1900; 6,172 in 1910; and 7,874 in 1920. African Americans numbered a mere 406 in1900, increasing to 2,296 in 1910 and 2,894 in 1920. Most blacks came to the state asstrikebreakers, replacing workers at the Roslyn and Cle Elum coal mines of the NorthernPacific in 1888 and the Green River coalfields of the Oregon Improvement Companyin 1891. Although many remained at these locations, a large but undetermined numbermigrated to the coastal cities, where other employment was available. However, becauseunions refused admittance to blacks (and Asians), they often entered the workforce asstrikebreakers.The city’s social hierarchy was evident in the distribution of the population. CityHall, nicknamed “Katzenjammer Kastle,” was but a ramshackle frame building. It waslocated near the cable car route on Yesler Way, part of Skid Road. Atop First Hill—a.k.a.“Profanity Hill”—stood the county courthouse and but a couple of blocks south of itthe twin-domed City Light building (after 1905). Uptown, to the north, lay the businessdistrict, along with hotels, residences, and even a school, Central School. Uphill from thisarea was the premier residential section, where the wealthier citizens built their mansions.In the 1920s upscale apartment houses—bearing such pretentious names as Gainsborough,Marlborough, and the like—were constructed among these expensive dwellings. Mansionsbuilt along Highland Drive with views of downtown, Mount Rainier, and Elliott Bay soonornamented the southern rim of Queen Anne Hill. When the exclusive gated communityof Highlands was developed about ten miles north of the city in 1909, many of First Hill’swealthy families settled there, away from the encroaching general population. In 1901 thedeveloper James Moore acquired much of Capitol Hill north of Republican Street betweenBroadway and about Twenty-fourth Avenue. Volunteer Park crowned this area. The Argustouted this section of the hill as the last of the “high grade residential properties to be

36 Part Oneplatted.” As was true throughout the city, asone moved downhill, one would find less andless expensive homes: homes housing bluecollarand lower paid clerical workers andtheir families tended to lie near the bottom ofthe hills and on flatter terrain.When Seattle’s “first apartment hotel”, the Lincoln,was constructed in 1899 at the northwest corner ofFourth Avenue and Madison Street the once remotelocation was considered almost intimate. The Lincolnis the centerpiece for this scene. One block northat Spring Street is the “big barn” First PresbyterianChurch. That sanctuary could seat 1,500 and itusually did for the pastor Mark Matthews gave outfrom its pulpit what many thought was the best showin town. Less prophetic shows were featured at theThird Avenue Theatre just behind the Lincoln—herewith the tower to the left. All these early twentiethcentury popular addresses could be easily reachedon the Madison Street cable cars, the slotted linethat runs left-right through the scene. In 1907 thetheatre was razed during the Third Avenue Regradeand Matthews and his flock also moved three blocksup First Hill to bigger quarters at Seventh and Spring.The hotel held on until it was destroyed by fire in1920. Surveying the ruins, the fire marshal describedthe once distinguished Lincoln as “little else than alumber yard with four brick walls around it.”The poorest of Seattle’s new arrivals settled in the central city, in and around YeslerWay, between Sixth Avenue and the waterfront. But once their countrymen establishedenclaves elsewhere, subsequent newcomers tended to bypass this downtown area to jointhem. This pattern held true for Scandinavians in particular, although the poorer of theirnumber continued to predominate in Skid Road until 1940. Most Scandinavians who leftthis area migrated to Ballard, where familiar employment could be found in its lumber andshingle mills as well as with its fishing fleet. This classic mill town, in which the StimsonMill had operated since 1890, was annexed by Seattle in 1907, adding 17,000 people tothe city. A “city of smokestacks,” Ballard contributed twelve percent of the state’s shinglevolume. It became known popularly as “Swedetown,” though Norwegians outnumberedSwedes. Salmon Bay on Ballard’s southern border soon became the home of the city’sfishing fleet.As the city filled up, its residential districts became more clearly defined alongclass and occupational lines. Unskilled and transient workers were attracted to cheaphotels, boardinghouses, and rooming houses in the core of the older part of the city. Theupper stratum of organized labor and the lower middle class moved to the lower slopesof most hills, along the flatter land. Examples are Ballard, Wallingford, the Green Lakeneighborhood, the Central District,Cascade, lower Queen Anne, and RainierValley. They also moved to a hill that thewealthier classes shunned: Beacon Hill.The 1902 opening of Seattle High School at BroadwayAvenue and Pine Street was a sign of how rapidly thecity was expanding, especially to the north. The city’sfirst dedicated high school soon took on the name ofthe avenue it faced and in 1908 Broadway was madeofficial. Lincoln High had been added in 1907, QueenAnne would be in 1909 and Franklin in 1912.Courtesy, Seattle Public Library

Social Fabric of the City37The English Tudor style Stimson-Green residence at MinorAvenue and Seneca Street is one of the few remaining First Hillmansions that for a few years made this, in sections, Seattle’sfirst exclusive neighborhood. There were also a good numberof more modest homes and duplexes in the mix. Lumberscions C. D. and Harriet Overton Stimson hired Spokane’sfamous aesthete-architect Kirtland Cutter to design it in 1899but then only lived in the house for fourteen years, after whichthey moved to the gated Highlands. Joshua Green, the secondresident, was a noted banker and genetic wonder who lived tothe age of 105 and for more than half of those years here onFirst Hill.Other blue-collar annexations took place in the years1905 to 1907. South Park and Georgetown each contributedabout 4,000 people, including truck farmers, to Seattle’spopulation in 1905. In 1907 Rainier Valley and Columbia City,both of which also had enclaves of farmers, contributed about7,000 residents each. West Seattle had a mere 1,500 to add tothe city’s numbers when annexed.In addition to the concentrations of Scandinaviansalready noted, there were clusters of other ethnic groups. PioneerChinese merchants had investedin real estate in the original citycore, which was centered aroundWashington and Main streets,before the anti-Chinese riotsof 1885 to 1886. At that timefewer than 300 Chinese livedin the city; they had numbered4,429 in 1880 in King County.By 1900 the Chinese populationin the city had expanded to 438;it more than doubled during thedecade and reached 1,351 by1920. As an almost entirely maleWhen James Moore, Seattle’s early-centurysuper-developer of additions, hotels,mansions, and business blocks, was inthe heat of developing Capitol Hill he wasregularly depicted in the local press in asteadfast pose like this one on the coverof The Commonwealth’s edition for 22November, 1902. It was Moore who gavethe hill its name, although he used it onlyfor that part he developed to the sides ofVolunteer Park. Fourteenth Avenue was hisshow strip of mansions. It was also knownas “Millionaire’s Row.” The view of it looksdue north to the standpipe that stood highabove the park’s southern entrance.

38 Part OneSoon after the Seattle Lake Shore andEastern Railroad reached it in 1887 SalmonBay began to fill up with mills, and by the endof 1888 there were ten of them. The SeattleCedar Mill, largest on the bay, opened in 1902.The combination of its towers and dryingstacks gave Ballard, the “Shingle Capitol ofthe World,” its familiar skyline. Both theseviews of Seattle Cedar date from ca. 1917.The one looks across Salmon Bay from nearthe Port of Seattle’s Fisherman’s Terminaland the other from the then new BallardBridge on Fifteenh Avenue Northwest.population in need of remunerative employment, the Chinese floated in and out of the city,often working as contract laborers in fruit and fish canneries, coal mines, and farms. Realestateinvestments extended to the blocks east of Chinatown, becoming the foundationof a “second Chinatown” (a term used by Doug and Art Chin in their history of Seattle’sChinatown) in the area between Maynard and Eighth avenues and Jackson and Wellerstreets. Symbolizing this movement was the construction in 1909 of the Milwaukee Hotelat 668½ King Street, which was financed by the Chinese consul Goon Dip. When the PekinCafé opened, also in 1909, it drew attention from the Argus, which said that the restaurantwas “operated by a syndicate of wealthy Chinese.” One of Chinatown’s pioneers was ChinGee Hee, who worked as a contract laborer in the 1870s and later invested the Wa ChongStore, which became the Quong Tuck Company. His Canton Hotel was the first permanentbuilding constructed after the 1889 fire. Befriended by the railroad attorney Thomas Burke,he returned to China to build railroads and ordered most of his supplies from Seattle, whichearned him honorary membershipin the Seattle Chamber ofCommerce.Chinatown became thenucleus around which otherAsians gathered as apartmentresidents, sojourners, and migrantlaborers. Their increasingnumbers contributed to the steadyexpansion south toward BeaconHill, where Asians were notbarred by restrictive covenants.In Chinatown were found Asianfoodstuffs and groceries, cafesand restaurants, import houses,antique and curio shops, hotels,laundries, and tailor shops. Whiteseasonal workers also collected inthe district, because lodging andeating were cheap. RememberingFollowing the city’s Great Fire in 1889, a new Chinatown developedsouth of Yesler Way and in the same neighborhood from whichpopulist vigilantes in the mid-1880s had evicted the first Chinesesettlers. One of the first brick structures built following the firewas Chin Gee Hee’s brick block at the northeast corner of SecondAvenue and Washington Street. Much of the building was loppedaway for the 1928 Second Avenue Extension.

Social Fabric of the Citythe earlier anti-Chinese riots,Chinese entrepreneurs took painsnot to compete with whites. Alsoin Chinatown’s interstices, tongs(secret societies) operated vicerackets, lotteries, and gambling,usually under some kind of policeprotection: the payoffs wereso bountiful that police oftencompeted for assignment to thisdistrict.The Japanese graduallyreplaced the Chinese as a sourceof cheap labor, often getting workwith businesses such as the GreatChin Gee Hee at his desk.Northern through Japanese laborcontractors. Some found employment at lumber mills in the Puget Sound basin and visitedthe city frequently enough to establish lasting contacts that resulted in their settling in andaround Chinatown, where they opened small shops. Japantown gradually spread beyondthe bounds of Chinatown, continuing eastward mainly along Alder Street on the north andLane Street on the south uphill toward Twelfth Avenue; it even extended southward alongTwelfth Avenue to the fringes of Beacon Hill. The sociologist Shotaro Frank Miyamoto39The East Kong Yick Building at the southwest corner of Eighth Avenue South and E. King Street survives asone of the more substantial structures built following the 1909 completion of the Jackson Street Regrade. Thebuilding is also a symbol of the Chinese American community for 170 of them joined as shareholders in 1910 tofinance both the East Kong Yick and—across the alley—the West Kong Yick buildings. (The former is scheduledto open in 2007 as the new home for the Wing Luke Asian Museum, the only pan-Asian Pacific American Museumin the United States.) Cheaper two–and three–story clapboard hotels were another feature of the new Chinese/International District. These at the southwest corner of King Street and Sixth Avenue South include the RussellHouse and the Mukilteo Hotel, both Japanese American hotels that catered to a diverse community of mostlyworking men. Following WWII this corner was developed as part of Uwajimaya, the largest family-owned Japanesefood business in America.

40 Part Onecharacterizes this time frame as the“settling in period”—a period thattended toward “ghettoization.”Small shops typified Japanesebusiness operations, though therewere enough hotels to justifythe formation of a JapaneseHotel Owners’ Association and asufficient number of businesses toestablish the Japanese Chamberof Commerce. A few of theirnumber were admitted to theSeattle Chamber of Commerce,most notably the millionaireMasajiro Furuya, to whom theA postcard for the Pekin Café promises the “Best Chinese-American Restaurant in the West . . .”Town Crier paid special tribute in July 1914. Miyamoto observed a tendency toward social“solidarity” among the Japanese who settled in the city. They were “joiners,” but not onlyin business organizations as noted above; they also formed their own labor unions. Eventhough the AFL did not accept them, Japanese unions refrained from strikebreaking whenother Asians were being recruited as scabs during the climactic 1916 longshoremen’s strike.During the 1919 General Strike, Japanese unions were admitted as nonvoting members ofthe Central Labor Council of Seattle. During this period many immigrants began farmingthe outlying land south of the city and the Duwamish, Green, and White River valleys,often establishing marketing cooperatives that catered to local consumers and ultimately tomarkets in the midwestern and northeastern United States.Most Japanese and Chinese youngsters were schooled at Main Street School until1921 when Bailey Gatzert School opened on Twelfth Avenue, a mere two blocks south ofJackson Street. Some Japanese parents chose to send their children to schools that werecloser to where they lived, such as Central School at Seventh Avenue and Madison Streetand Pacific School on Twelfth Avenue just south of Cherry Street. Not until the 1930s didJapanese and Chinese teens start entering nearby high schools in large numbers, for the firsttime merging significantly with the white majority. This acculturation of the Japanese wasabruptly halted when they were evacuated to internment camps in early 1942.Other ethnic groups, including Jews, African Americans, and Italians, also tendedto cluster together in one neighborhood. Like theJapanese, Jews played a much larger role in thecommunity than their modest numbers wouldindicate. However, being white, they were ableto merge with the majority population. GermanJews arrived the earliest, well before the turn ofthe century. Jacob Furth migrated from Bohemia,sojourning in Colusa, California, before enteringthe banking business in Seattle and then rising tothe presidency of the Seattle Electric Company

Social Fabric of the Cityin 1900. Schwabacher Brothers, a hardware and grocery business based in San Francisco,had operations first in Walla Walla in the 1860s and then in Seattle in the 1870s. TheSchoenfeld family started a furniture store that became the city’s largest, the StandardFurniture Company. Cooper and Levy became one of the main outfitters of Alaska goldseekers and frequently staked some of them. The Grunbaum family also operated a furniturebusiness, and their stores remain in operation in the region, as do the Schoenfelds’ stores,though no longer at their original locations and under different names.The first Sephardic Jews, two in fact, arrived in 1903: Solomon Calvo and JacobPolicar from the Turkish island of Marmara. Their letters home enticed others to join themin Seattle. One Nessim Alhadeff came from the island of Rhodes in 1904. Like Calvo hepeddled fish, and both eventually founded fish companies that stayed in business until afterWorld War II. One was named Calvo’s Waterfront Fish Company, the other Alhadeff’sPalace Fish Company, whose motto was “If it swims we have it.” In 1907 nineteen moreSephardim arrived. By 1910 there were about 4,500 Jews in Seattle, of whom about 600were Sephardim. It has been estimated that about eighty-five percent of the Jews livedeast of Twelfth Avenue between Cherry Street and Yesler Way. The earliest arrivals settledbetween Ninth and Twelfth avenues, near Japantown. Their numbers grew as they werejoined by relatives from their homelands, whom they sent for when sufficient money hadbeen saved for transportation. By 1917 Sephardim numbered about 1,500, Ashkenazimabout 8,500. The larger number of Ashkenazim can be attributed to the pogroms mountedagainst Jews at the turn of the century in Poland and Russia.The Jewish neighborhood spread, mainly along Washington Street and Yesler Way,to Eighteenth Avenue, where the community built two synagogues. The earliest recreationcenter was the Collins playfield on Washington Street between Fifteenth and Sixteenthavenues. Built in 1912 its field house accommodated men’s and women’s clubs as well asBoy Scout and Girl Scout troops, and it drew increasing numbers of Japanese youngsters astheir community expanded beyond the confines of Japantown. The Seattle Council of JewishWomen moved its educational center near Fourteenth Avenue and Washington Street toEighteenth Avenue and Washington. The center, called Settlement House, accommodatedsocial and educational functions and, not less important, the city’s first public bathhouse.Collins continued to be the main recreation center for Jews, primarily, but also for the growingnumber of Japanese. Reflecting the broader social concerns of many Jews, the Ladies’41Courtesy, Seattle Public School ArchivesCourtesy, Seattle Public LibraryStudents of the old Main Street School at 517 MainStreet pause for a portrait before being led by theirprincipal Ada Mahon in a procession to Bailey Gatzert,their then brand new school building at Twelfth AvenueSouth and Weller Street.

42 Part OneHebrew Benevolent Association(which was established in 1903)established a free dispensary inthe Arcade Building on SecondAvenue. Attached was a clinicallaboratory, which providedmedical aid to the “deservingpoor” without ethnic distinction.Historian Quintard Taylorhas provided the definitivestudy of the origins and developmentsof Seattle’s black communityin his 1994 classic. Here,that history is merely introduced.Seattle’s African Americancommunity originated in1882, when a black pioneernamed William Gross boughttwelve acres of land from HenryYesler for $1,000. Gross gaveaway some lots to friends andsold the rest. Located betweenTwenty-fourth and Twenty-seventhavenues between Howelland Olive streets, this area became the nucleus of the city’soriginal Black community. Gross had been a steward onthe Constitution, a boat shuttling between Olympia andTacoma in the late 1850s. He settled in Seattle in 1858,when he established a popular inn called Our House. Theshipbuilder Robert Moran claimed to have been stakedby Gross after “I was dumped out without breakfast onYesler’s wharf at 6 o’clock in the morning of NovemberBoth views courtesy Museum of History and IndustryThe Standard Furniture Buildingat the northwest corner of SecondAvenue and Pine Street was builtas soon as its big lot was broughtto a new grade during the razingof Denny Hill. Completed in 1907of steel, with large windows and aterra-cotta tile skin, it survives asan early example of a Seattle highrise.Like its building the businesswas also bold. “Your Credit isGood” was the come-hither linethat for years Standard Furniturepainted throughout the city onwhat seemed like every availablelarge surface. A decade earlierCooper and Levy led the way insaturation marketing by promotingtheir gold rush outfitting service onbroadsides, billboards, periodicals,and banners flapping from theroofs of trolleys. Operating outof the old Olympic Block on thesoutheast corner of Yesler Wayand First Avenue South, Cooperand Levy’s miners supplies spreadto the sidewalk.

Courtesy, Esther MumfordSusie Revels Cayton, wife of Horace;associate editor of the SeattleRepublican.Social Fabric of the City4317, 1875.” The then 17-year-old Moran had a singledime in his pocket.In the 1890s, many blacks, who had migrated tothe state as strikebreakers at the coal mines in Roslyn andCle Elum and in the Green River coalfields at Franklin,began to settle in Seattle. Blacks who worked mainlyas porters on the railroads found the city hospitable.(Porters in the train depots, or redcaps, were usuallyJapanese.) Porters tended to take up residency, at leasttemporarily, near the railway stations, from whichthey radiated up Jackson Street to the racially mixedsubcommunities where low-rent housing and cheaperhotels could be found. Blacks gradually developed twoother neighborhoods—one between Yesler Way andJackson Street around Twelfth Avenue, a second in thearea around Twenty-third Avenue north of Jackson Street.The most prestigious African American neighborhood,however, remained the one started by William Gross.African American churches functioned just as Jewish synagogues did, serving as the socialcenters of the community. Established in 1894, Mount Zion Baptist Church eventuallybecame the first “identifiable center” of the Black community, according to James SylvesterJackson, the first president of the Seattle Urban League. First located at Third Avenue andUniversity Street, the church moved to Eighth Avenue near Pike Street and then finally toits present location at Nineteenth Avenue and Madison Street. The second “center” wasthe First African Methodist Episcopal Church, originally at Fifth Avenue and Pike Streetand currently at Fourteenth Avenue and Pine Street. There were also a number of smallerdenominations with churches.Despite their small number, African Americans still encountered discriminationat all levels of social intercourse. After a lively debate within the Washington Federationof Women’s Clubs in 1901, members refused toremove the color line from federation bylaws.Alexander Pantages allowed blacks to sit only inthe balconies of his theaters. Unions, except theMarine Cooks and Stewards Union, denied themmembership; the Marine Cooks and StewardsUnion did not establish a color line when it startedup in 1901 because two of its founding memberswere blacks. Of the steamship companies, onlythe Alaska Steamship Company would employblacks, on one ship only, as cooks and sculleryworkers.The most prominent African Americanin Seattle was Horace Cayton, publisher ofthe Seattle Republican, the only black-ownedWilliam Gross

44 Part Onenewspaper in the state. His spouse and associate was Susie Revels, the daughter of HiramRevels, the first African American U.S. senator and later the president of Alcorn Collegein Mississippi. Cayton was active in the Republican Party: he served as secretary of theKing County Republican Club and, as a delegate to state nominating conventions, on theState Central Committee as well. Besides printing biographical sketches of party leaders,Cayton proudly published accounts of the region’s black pioneers and stories about thecareers of successful contemporaries to provide black role models for the young. Whenhe began publishing news of rampant lynching in the South, his circulation declined andhe lost patronage. After ceasing publication in 1913 and selling his beautiful home nearVolunteer Park, he purchased an apartment house at Twenty-second Avenue and JacksonStreet, calling it Caytonian Court and renting out “2 and 3 room apartments at $10 and$15 a month.” In 1917 Cayton was refused service in a restaurant that he had regularlypatronized. His legal suit was promptly dismissed. Such discrimination against AfricanAmericans became more common during the war years.Italian immigrants usually came from rural regions and were mostly poor anduneducated. Most had worked as common laborers in their homeland, often in Italy’s mines.Those who could not find mining work settled in semirural enclaves of Seattle, wherethey and their families could grow crops for the household. Some found Rainier Valleycongenial; others preferred Georgetown, South Park, and Youngstown, where employmentwas more readily available. Ellen Roe, a graduate student in sociology at the University ofWashington, estimated that in 1915 about eighty-five percent of the men worked as commonlaborers in unsteady employment. Between 200 and 300 men leased farmland, and of thosemen, about eighty sold produce at thePike Place Public Market, competing withJapanese farmers and the commissionproduce merchants. They also peddledtheir produce in the neighborhoods, goinghouse to house. In addition to commonlaborers and farmers, Roe found onelawyer, two medical doctors, and a fewwholesalers and importers among theItalian immigrant males.It is six blocks north on Western Avenue fromthe old Commission District, shown on the left,to the Pike Place Public Market. In 1907, the yearthat the public market was founded, the grocerybrokers down near the docks and along Marion(here) and Madison streets regularly chargedretail grocers in the afternoon twice the amountthey paid farmers for their produce in the morning.The Public Market was a progressive venture tocreate a friendly place where families and farmerscould buy and sell freely, reasonably, and directlywithout the commissioner’s mark up. Many ofthe farmers benefited by this successful venturewere from the Japanese and Italian Americancommunities. This is perhaps the earliest view ofthe market—from its first year.

Popular Entertainment45Popular EntertainmentStreetcar lines ran to each of the Lake Washington amusement parks—Madison,Madrona, and Leschi. After the lure of these trolley parks subsided the city purchased themfrom the street railway companies that had first developed them. Another early trolleyreached Woodland Park by circling Green Lake. Compared to the recreational destinationson Green Lake, Lake Union, and on the west shore of Lake Washington, streetcars firstreached the salt water beaches of West Seattle in 1907. The engineering for this requiredmiles of trestles and a crossing of the Duwamish River over the first Spokane Street Bridge.The first trolley unloaded thrill-seekers at Luna Park on July 4, the day that amusementpark and its many attractions first opened at Duwamish Head. Previously steamer and ferryservice provided the only means of access to the long and often excellent beach betweenthe Head and Alki Point.However, most opportunities for recreation had to be near people’s homes, giventhe limitations of transportation and the six-day workweek. The Board of Park Commissionersattempted to retain views of the mountains and the water and to preserve existingcity woodlands. What they managed to accomplish by the time the United States enteredWorld War I is largely what the city has today.The Board of Park Commissioners was established in 1884, when David Dennydonated the Seattle Cemetery to the city. The tract, near Westlake Avenue and Denny Wayin what became a regrade area,would be renamed Seattle Park(after the coffins were removed)and then finally Denny Park.The park board had no powerof condemnation, and its 1892budget of $100,000 did not allowthe commissioners to buy muchWith boat rentals, beachside bandstands, a grand pavilion, and muchmore, Madison Park was probablythe city’s grandest example ofan attraction built to lure riderson a street railway in 1890. Aspecial attraction of this magnetwas the gated field with coveredbleachers designed principally forbaseball. By the time the abovephotograph was taken in 1911 itwas also a popular oval for racing.Here,cyclist Archie Taft leadsthe pack and will hold it, winningthe 100–mile “race of the day” ina record time of two hours, oneminute and twenty-four seconds.courtesy Thomas Samuelsenland outright; they expressed aneed for $500,000.A park superintendent,E. O. Schwagerl, was at last appointed that year. Toimplement his master plan, he looked for land that was themost “suitable for public pleasure.” This would prove to becourtesy Michael Maslan

46 Part Onethe shore between Bailey Peninsula (upon which Seward Park is now located) and MadisonPark, where John J. McGilvra’s Madison Street cable car line terminated; the peninsula andpark were to be connected by a boulevard. The assistant city engineer, George Cotterill,would help realize this plan. He was also the head of the Queen City Good Roads Club andmobilized volunteers to construct twenty-five miles of bicycle paths.Guy Phinney sold Woodland Park, which he had acquired and platted in 1887,to the city in 1900 for $100,000. Three years later the park inherited Leschi Park’s zoopopulation, after the Seattle ElectricCompany found the Yesler cable carline, which terminated in the park, nolonger profitable enough to operate thezoo. Harry Chadwick speculated that thecompany hoped to profit from carryingzoo-goers to Woodland Park.The commissioners alsopurchased Washington Park in 1900.At its south end the park bordered theMadison cable car route and so was easilyreached. Summer cottages began to dotthe shores of Lake Washington betweenMadrona Park and what is now MountBaker Park. Above the beach at MadronaPark, a small piece of virgin rain forestlaced with footpaths had been preserved.A hotel and a boat launch added to thepark’s recreational facilities; the hotelburned down in about 1910. NearbyLeschi Park was an amusement parkfeaturing a six-story casino that had beenbuilt in 1892, and the casino’s owner,theater magnate John Cort, diverted someof his downtown vaudeville fare to it. ItsBefore trolleys reached the beaches of West Seattle in1907, one either caught the West Seattle Ferry at thefoot of Marion Street or a small steamer for a quickertrip directly to Alki Beach. In the hottest days ofsummer the beach was crowded with swimmers whowere served lemonade, ice cream, and sandwichesfrom decorated stands. Bathhouses competed inthe swimsuit rental business. The oldest of the threescenes grouped here is of young men and boys posingon Alki Beach in 1902. Five years later the great wideand illuminated dock of Luna Park opened over theshallow tideflats off of Duwamish Head. From itsrides and varied amusements the West Seattle ferryterminal on Harbor Avenue was an easy five-minutewalk.

47Members of the Millerfamily pose beside theirshoreline homes in thespring of 1911. GeorgeMiller was a pile driverand familiar with shorelineconstruction. In 1938 thisportion of the Lake Washingtonbeach was clearedfor the first Lake Washingtonfloating bridge.Courtesy Peggy Duncanstage reputedly was second only to one in San Francisco in size. Following Cort’s lead,George K. Beede soon opened the Madison Park Pavilion. Both Cort and Beede startedby offering family entertainment, but their facilities became beer halls once their ownersfound ways to circumvent licensing requirements.The fairground at Madison Park doubled as a racetrack, where as late as 1911 thegenteel sport of harness racing received the backing of the sheriff, Edward Cudihee, whowas convinced horse racing could be done independent of the “betting ring.” Cudiheewanted to divert true horse lovers away from the Meadows Racetrack, south of Seattle nearthe Duwamish River. The Argus in 1908 called the Meadows the “worst gambling hole thathas ever been opened in the county of King. . . . Men lose their all at the races, and womenlose more than the men . . . their souls. Young boys too.” After being refurbished for theAlaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, Madison Park was allowed to deteriorate until1919, when the city bought it.Woodland Park’s caretaker’s cottage appears in the right background of this early version of a bear pit atWoodland Park Zoo.courtesy, Seattle Municipal Archive

48 Part OneThe opening of the Meadows Racetrack in1902 spurred the Seattle Electric Company tocarry betting men to the track like livestockto rendering. Here a string of freight carsoutfitted with seats and improvised coversprepares to head for the track from FirstAvenue South at King Street.Courtesy, Dan KerleeIn the summer of 1901, an estimated two thousand people ferried and a comparablenumber traveled by private boat every day to Alki Beach and its adjoining amusementpark—Luna Park, which had a natatorium. By 1909 Chadwick had seen “everything . . .from log camps costing many thousands of dollars, to the cheapest kind of loneliest tents.Farms have been invaded.” Another observer described the scene: “For three solid milesshacks and camps and cottages are so near together that it practically amounts to one solidblock.”The park board had acquired a number of smaller parcels of land, either bydonation or purchase. Nothing linked them together, however, until the commissionersdecided in 1903 to contract with Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts—theforemost landscape architectural firm in the country—to develop a comprehensive plan.The Olmsteds urged the commissioners to acquire as much land as possible that had viewsof the water, mountains, and woodlands, but cautioned them that the plan might have to beimplemented piecemeal.Like the pavilion at Madison Park this grand structure at Leschi Park served many tastes but most often it wasvariety, theatre, and concerts—sometimes with dancing. When overlooked by policy, liquor was also servedwithin these protected walls away from the canoes, gardens, and waterside promenades outside.

Popular EntertainmentOne of the primaryaims of John C. Olmsted wasa democratic one, to provide apark or playground within a halfmile of every home in the city.However, the boulevards thatlinked the parks and playgroundsrequired then expensive motorcarsto explore and were to that extentelitist in practice. The parkways were also drawnto bypass the popular but increasingly tawdryCourtesy Friends of Seattle’s Olmsted ParksMadison Park. The populist hodgepodge of Alki Parks and parkways planner John C. Olmsted.Beach stood on the periphery and so, conveniently,could not be integrated at the time. But the plan was also visionary. By acquiring right-ofwayswhen they were still affordable, the Olmsted plan foresaw the general conveniencethat cheaper autos would offer, especially following the First World War.Lake Washington Boulevard was the Olmsted plan’s show parkway. Dependingon what land was then still available, the boulevard was built both beside and above LakeWashington. Beginning at the Bailey Peninsula (Seward Park) it continues north alongthe shoreline to Mount Baker beach, where it climbs upland above the designated Yeslerslide area, before returning to the shore at Leschi. Continuing north past Madrona Park49The impressively long line of a caravan sponsored by the Seattle Press Club winds its way through the gentlecurves of the nearly new Lake Washington Boulevard at Mt. Baker and Colman Parks. An original print of thisscene kept at the Museum of History and Industry dates it 1911. This might have been contradicted by the lead car,which is a 1912 Model 17 Winton, except, then as now, a year’s models were introduced before the year itself.Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry. Photo by Webster and Stevens.

50 Part Onethe boulevard leaves the lake and meanders through hairpin curves toward WashingtonPark, which it enters at Thirty-first Avenue and East Madison Street. After passing throughthe park and eventually reaching the University of Washington campus, the boulevardcontinues on toward Woodland Park.A number of spurs are attached to this impressively long and picturesque route.One of these leaves Lake Washington Boulevard at Mt. Baker beach and eventuallyreaches the Duwamish Valley after passing by Franklin High School and over Beacon Hill.Another connects the system of parkways to Magnolia by way of Queen Anne Hill andSmith Cove. A shorter spur reaches Volunteer Park through Interlaken Boulevard, whichwas first developed as a bike trail in the late 1890s. Another circles Green Lake.In 1904 the park commissioners succeeded in getting an initiative passed thatrevised the park charter, removing the park board from the city council’s control. Also,the formerly dispersed agencies for playgrounds, parks, parkways, and boulevards werebrought under the board’s jurisdiction. The park board’s operating budget came from tenpercent of the monies received for all licenses, fees, and fines, plus “not less than threefourthsof a mill of the annual tax levy.” The board was off and running. Voters approvedbond issues for land acquisition in the amount of $500,000 in 1906, $1 million in 1908, $2million in 1910, and $500,000 in 1912, providing the essential seed money to implementthe Olmsteds’ plan.It was this plan that underlay any beautification the city would undergo in thefuture, and it was the most comprehensive plan before the 1970s. Olmsted Brothers wouldembellish the plan by laying out the University of Washington campus (after designing theAlaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition site) and the Washington Park Arboretum.Spurred by the desire to spruce up the city for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition,the park board acquired Bailey Peninsula and Ravenna Park by condemnation and purchasedMadrona and Leschi parks from the Seattle Electric Company in 1909. In 1913 the boardsecured the land along the shore between the Bailey Peninsula and Madrona Park (exceptthe Yesler slide area) from the state legislature. By that year, twenty-five miles of improvedroadway—one-half of the projected fifty miles—had been completed on the boulevardsystem.Frank Nowell’s official “captiveballoon” aerial above the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific-Exposition’s ArcticCircle includes only a few buildingsthat have survived the century—nearly—since the 1909 Exposition.However, the birds-eye view, whichNowell describes as recorded from“a quarter of a mile above theearth,” also reveals the still familiaroverall shape of the University ofWashington campus designed bythe Olmsted Brothers for the AYPand posterity.

Popular Entertainment51Book loans and storytelling were additionalparts of the Playground Movement’s supplyof services. Here, Librarian Gertrude Andrusreads to a sandbox filled with attentivechildren at the Collins Playfield, whichwas made a deposit station for the SeattlePublic Library. Named for John Collins, aformer city mayor (1873) who died in 1903,the three-acre site between Washington andMain Streets and Fourteenth and SixteenthAvenues was chosen because of itssurrounding rainbow of races, nationalities,and religions. Movement progressivesbelieved supervised play in well-appointedplaygrounds would more often than notencourage creative and peaceful recreationamong the races and sexes.Playground work proceeded slowly until 1907, when the park board, pressed by“popular demand for recreational facilities,” improved the four existing playgrounds andplaced male and female supervisors at each location during the summers. By the end of1912, the high point of expansion, Seattle possessed twenty-eight parks, twelve improvedplaygrounds, four field houses, and the Alki Bathing Beach. Not until the Great Depressionwould the parks and playgrounds receive comparable attention—not through local fundingbut through an infusion of federal money.Before the depression of 1893 to 1896, Seattle boasted a large number of theaters,box houses, and stock companies for legitimate theater as well as for variety and vaudeville.The Playground Movement with its new equipment like swings, teeter totters, rings and supervised recreation hadthe hoped-for effect of increasing the percentage of girls visiting and using the new attractions. In the summer of1909, the year this Capitol Hill scene was recorded, Park Department statistics revealed that of the daily averageof 850 “young folks” who played upon the apparatuses of Seattle’s first four playfields, 550 were girls ranging inage from four to fourteen years. In 1909 this was still called Lincoln Park. Soon, however, the name was changedto Broadway Park and more recently changed again to the Bobby Morris Playfield.

52 Part OneWhen the depression hit, most of these enterprises closed down, and their owners (men likeJohn Cort, John Considine, and George Beede) left for greener pastures. Cort, for instance,established a circuit of theaters along the Northern Pacific route but ended up losing them.Those Seattle theater operations that survived the financial crisis were done away with byreform legislation enacted during the decade. Cort and Considine returned on the heels ofthe Klondike gold rushers. Many independent houses sprang up at that time, only to almostimmediately go out of business.Only the legitimatetheaters, the Seattle Theaterand the Third Avenue Theater,survived to greet the theaterrevivalists and new arrivals.Keeping those theaters alive wasthe contract that their ownersheld with the New York bookingagency Klaw and Erlinger, butKlaw and Erlinger rarely sent itsbetter shows on the road. For thatreason, the theater owners had toVaudevillians posing in Alley.offer Seattle audiences stock performances, a more mediocre fare.Cort decided, while announcing his intention to bring respectable vaudeville andfamily entertainment to the city, to turn his Palm Garden Theater in the business districtnorth of the deadline into a box house. Cort survived the ensuing protest because of hispolitical control over the Third Ward. Upon completing the renovation, he renamed thetheater the Grand Opera House and proclaimed it to be the city’s “finest.” When thebuilding was damaged by fire in January 1917, the Town Crier claimed it was only one ofsuch structures “inviting disasters.”Street regrading forced closure of his Third Avenue Theater in 1907, but Cort soonmoved to a much grander venue when he became the manager of the new Moore Theater atSecond Avenue and Virginia Street. There he ran his classiest shows, relegating secondaryones to the Grand.After Cort leased the theaters along the Northern Pacific railroad route, heestablished a booking agency, the Northwest Theatrical Association, to contest Klaw andErlinger. By 1910 the association controlled about twelve hundred theaters that featuredone-night stands. Klawand Erlinger respondedby entering the Northwestin September of that yearand contracting with theMetropolitan Theater. TheMetropolitan was thenunder construction in theMetropolitan Tract, whichThe Moore Theatre

The cartoon’s caption fromArgus reads, “Mr. Pantagesis not an actor—not evena ‘bad actor.’ He is a manwho, alone and unaided,in spite of all trusts andcombinations, has built up astring of vaudeville theatersextending throughout thenorthwest. The artist got himmixed up with the leadingman at the Lois, one of Mr.Pantages’ Seattle theaters.”Popular Entertainment53was owned by the University of Washington. The university hadvacated the ten-acre tract when it moved to its present locationin 1895. Cort retreated from the booking business, content tomanage his Seattle holdings. Klaw and Erlinger then agreed torun its shows through the Cort houses.When the Spokane City Council passed an ordinance in1897 barring women from employment in box-house theaters,John Considine abruptly left his managerial position at thePeople’s Theater to return to Seattle. After being acquitted forthe shooting of Chief Meredith in 1901, Considine “crossed theLine and established himself as one of Seattle’s most successfulbusinessmen,” in the historian Murray Morgan’s words.Considine bought a half interest in the city’s first movie house,Edison’s Unique Theater. The theater historian Eugene Elliottcredits Considine with establishing the first popularly pricedvaudeville chain in the world. While his theaters fanned outacross the city, Considine decided to expand outside the PacificNorthwest by joining forces with the Tammany Hall leaderTimothy Sullivan in 1906. They opened the Lyceum in SanFrancisco and the Grand in Tacoma. Altogether they accumulatedtwenty-one houses in the Northwest and affiliated with twentymore in California; they booked heavily in the Midwest aswell. Considine then formed the Northwest Orpheum Circuitto allow the rotation of shows from San Francisco to Minneapolis; it became the firsttranscontinental, popularly priced vaudeville service in the United States. When Sullivandied in 1914, Considine reorganized, selling all except the Northwest Orpheum Circuit.A notable newcomer to the city’s theater business was Alexander Pantages, whosoon rivaled Considine. Pantages arrived in Seattle in 1902 and with the grubstake that hehad made by shipping entertainment to Alaska saloons he opened his first theatre here, theCrystal. It prospered and he promptly opened his namesake Pantages Vaudeville House atthe northeast corner of Second Avenue and Seneca Street in 1904. The Greek immigrantwas, at least, rumoredto be illiterate and yetwas able to conversein several languages.And he hired almost noone, performing nearlyevery function himself.The ordinary fare wasabbreviated vaudeville,spiced between actswith fast-flying movingpictures—all for tenPantages Vaudeville House

54 Part OneThe Seattle Theatre (top left), and The Third Avenue Theatre (top right)Through much of its sixteen years the Third Avenue Theatre was one of the most popular playhouses in America.With its corner tower at the northeast corner of Third and Madison the clapboard landmark had two stages.Typically vaudeville was run upstairs and a variety of farce and melodrama on the main stage. The building wassacrificed to the Third Avenue Regrade in 1907.Three blocks south the Seattle Theatre opened at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Cherry Street in 1892.The festooned interior featured a double balcony, and to the sides four rows of loges with velvet curtains. It wasSeattle’s stage for “leading attractions” through much of its thirteen years. However, towards the end, it wasmixing variety and one-reel films with as many as fifteen performances a day.The Metropolitan Theatre’s front façade facing University Street. The ca. 1915 view looks south with a horizonthat extends from St. James Cathedral, upper left, to the Elks Lodge Building, far right, at the southwest corner ofFourth and Spring. The nearly completed YWCA Building at Fifth and Seneca looms above the theatre.

Popular Entertainment55Long-time rivals in the business of managing andpromoting theatre circuits, John W. Considine, left, andAlexander Pantages, right, to quote Murray Morgan,“took great pleasure in stealing acts from each other.Pantages probably came out ahead . . . Performers,aware of the rivalry between the two promoters, wouldmake tentative agreements with each and wait untilthey arrived in Seattle to learn which promoter offeredmore . . . Some years after Pantages had driven his rivalto the wall, his daughter Carmen, who had been bornin Seattle, married Considine’s son, John Junior.”Opening in 1900 a half block downCherry Street from the SeattleTheatre, the Grand Opera Housesoon usurped its older neighbor asthe city’s most distinguished stage.But this prominence was shortlived,surpassed first in 1907 withthe opening of the Moore Theatre atSecond Avenue and Virginia Streetin the Denny Regrade, and againin 1911 with the introduction of thepalatial Metropolitan Theatre onthe south side of University Streetmid-block between Fourth and Fifthavenues. In 1924 the Metropolitanwas “wrapped” on three sides bythe Olympic Hotel, leaving onlyits front “Venetian” facade andmarquee to face University Street.The Grand Opera HouseSeattle’s Standard Theatre (right) at the southeast corner of OccidentalAvenue South and Washington Street was, when loose times allowed,a classic box house. The entrance on Washington Street was next doorto the Our House Saloon. Early twentieth century real estate broker andtheatre enthusiast Henry Broderickdescribed the stage at the Lyric,it’s then new name, as “more orless a blind for the real curriculumof boy meets girl . . . At the rearof the balcony were a series ofloggias, [the boxes] each equippedwith chaise lounge and opaquecurtains where waitresses offeredshenanigans at market prices. Inshort, this showplace, in the verycenter of a then vibrant skid-road,was a brazen bagnio.” Broderick’sclaim that “It was the only placein town where one could be in atheatre and a bordello at the sametime” is too modest. There weremore.

56 Part Onecents a customer. Riding the wave of Seattle’s boom andhis own savvy for what the public wanted, Pantages alsoopened the Lois Theatre, which ran stock theater and wasnamed for his wife, a violinist who always played the firstact whenever her husband opened a new house. In 1915Pantages dedicated his grandest Seattle theatre, againthe Pantages, at Third Avenue and University Street, onthe northeast corner where Plymouth CongregationalChurch earlier chose to build its second sanctuary afterthe “Great fire of 1889.”Considine and Pantages competed feverishly,stealing each other’s performers and running the sameshow concurrently, each trying to outdo the other. It allended when Considine’s mortgage was foreclosed in1915, the year his rival opened his namesake terra-cottalandmark.Pantages then picked up the parts of Considine’scircuit that he wanted. By 1920 his was the strongesttheater organization in the country. At his best Pantagesran about seventy houses, most of them on the WestCoast, including a six-theater chain in San Francisco.Many of his most lavish theatres—including the SeattlePantages—were designed by Seattle architect B. MarcusPriteca. The grand sum of these contracts helpedmake Priteca one of the greats in the history of theatrearchitecture.Eugene Elliott claims that Seattle’s theatersranked second only to New York’s by about 1905. Atabout this time, moving pictures were slowly makingtheir entrance, normally, as noted, being presentedbetween vaudeville acts. There were as yet few moviehouses. For highbrow entertainment one had to rely uponthe Moore Theatre and the Metropolitan—the latter hadbeen modeled upon the Doge’s Palace in Venice.Many of those who migrated from the East andMidwest brought their cultural aspirations with them. Thewomen who were wives of businessmen and professionalsoften had received musical training before arriving in thecity. Twenty such women gathered in early 1891 at thehome of Mrs. George Bacon to form the Ladies MusicalClub. Their purpose was to “stimulate the developmentPost-Intelligencer advertisement forthe April 1917 performance of theNew York Symphony Orchestra at theMoore Theatre.of musical activity in Seattle.” The club’s first musical director, Martha Blanka Churchill,had been a student of Franz Liszt. All active members had to be musicians and pass a clubaudition. By 1905 the club had grown to 95 active members and 217 associate members and

Popular Entertainmentby 1921 to 158 active membersand 360 associate members; thesenumbers included men.The club’s monthlyconcerts produced a solid coreof classical music enthusiasts.Hoping to elevate the city’sgeneral musical taste, RosaGottstein suggested that the clubsponsor what would become theArtists Concert Series, whichstarted in 1900 with a concert Included among the advertisements in the Post-Intelligencer’sby the reputedly greatest woman expanded arts coverage for Sunday, 15 July, 1917, are Summerpianist of the time, Teresa School dates for the Cornish School of Music, a come-on from theinstructors “stringed instruments exclusively” at Long’s AcademyCarreno. The Chicago Symphony of Music, and a small one-inch ad for Saint Nicholas School.Orchestra’s performance during Cornish, of course, survives and so does St. Nicholas, althoughthe 1901–1902 season brought not by name. In the early 1970s the girls of St. Nicholas mergedwith the boys at Lakeside School. Also featured is a Seattle stringin enough money to make thequarter that includes, second from the right, John Spargur, whoseries a permanent part of the although not the Seattle Symphony’s first director was for many ofclub’s program. Every year Rosa its early years the Symphony’s mainstay.Gottstein would go east, allegedlywith at least $20,000 in contributions, and sign up artists for the coming season.57courtesy, Seattle Symphony OrchestraWhat seems to be the earliest extant portrait of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra shows a small ensemble ofplayers. Most of the orchestra members almost certainly also played in theatre and/or restaurant orchestras andtaught their instruments as well. Seasoned professionals, their performances were appreciated from the start.

58 Part OneNellie Cornish, piano instructor andnamesake founder of Cornish Schoolof Music.Other classical music organizations enrichedthe city’s musical fare. There were two musical artssocieties, the Schubert Society and the Seattle ChoralSymphony. Seattle’s offerings in early 1917, as the nationwas preparing to enter the Great War, attest to the city’smusical vitality. The Ladies Musical Club presentedJulia Culp at the Moore, where the Ballet Russe and theBoston National Grand Opera Company also performedthat year. In addition, the Seattle Symphony Orchestraplayed at the Hippodrome, one of the musical artssocieties gave a concert, the Flonzaley String Quartetperformed, and the violinist Efram Zimbalist playedwith the New York Symphony Orchestra at the Moore.The Seattle Symphony Orchestra, an all-malemusical group gathered under the direction of HarryWest, began inauspiciously in 1903 by giving a concertin the Arcade Building’s auditorium. Its audiencesexpanded, inspiring its move in November 1907 to Cort’sGrand Opera House. A group of societywomen became disgruntled with theorchestra’s leadership and formed theSeattle Symphony Orchestra Society.The society hired Michael Kegrize asconductor. Henry K. Hadley succeededKegrize in 1909, just in time for thesymphony to entertain audiences at theAlaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.After the exposition, the MooreTheatre, built in 1907, became thesymphony’s regular concert hall. ButThe Seattle Fine Arts Association‘s1909 exhibit of oriental rugs atthe then nearly new downtownCarnegie Public Library was bothpopular and instructive. Then, asnow, having an oriental rug on thefloor was for many a sure sign ofgood taste.Two stories above the Allen Tireand Rubber Company and near thecenter of Seattle’s early-century“Auto Row,” the arts taught atthe Cornish School of Music arebanded in block letters acrossthe top of the Booth Building onCapitol Hill at Broadway Avenueand Pine Street.

Popular Entertainment 59Hadley could not resist an offer from San Francisco, and John Spargur was hired to replacehim. In 1912 Spargur added children’s concerts to the symphony’s offerings. The war yearsproved to be lean and led to the symphony’s financial reorganization and a successful$100,000 fund drive in 1919 under the banker James Hoge’s leadership. Spargur thenenlarged the orchestra to eighty-five members and introduced concerts at the new MasonicTemple near Broadway on Pine Street.Upon abandoning a frustrating career as a classical pianist and teacher in California,Nellie Cornish returned to Seattle in November 1914. She was dedicated to the novelMontessorian Fletcher Method of teaching, which she had learned in Boston in 1904. Sheincorporated Calvin Brainerd Cady’s theory of musical education into her repertoire, afterbecoming familiar with it in 1911. Cady looked upon music as a means of “furnishingopportunity for the development of logic, discrimination, and critical judgement.” In thismethod, students were allowed to proceed at their own pace. Anxious to start a school toimplement these ideas, Cornish earned the support of banker friends and rented the secondfloor of the Booth Building at Broadway and Pine Street. Her friend Martha Sackett,a piano teacher, loyally joined her, bringing along her twenty-five students. Two otherfriends joined the faculty. Eighty-five students enrolled in 1914, the school’s first year;one hundred enrolled in 1915. She added more faculty, though somewhat serendipitously:sometimes she would hire a talented artist or instructor who happened to be in the area,sometimes a person with the special training that she wanted for the curriculum.The Cornish School’s immediate success testified to the city’s need for such aprogram. The bulk of its students came from well-to-do families. In 1917 the arts editorat the P-I commented that Cornish had “among its patrons some of the leading families ofthe Northwest.” In just three years it had enrolled six hundred pupils, making it the largestschool of its kind west of Chicago. The society leader Harriet Stimson considered NellieCornish “a citizen the city can’t afford to lose.” And when the school faced a financial crisisduring the postwar depression, Stimson led the board of trustees in rescuing it by formingthe Cornish Realty Company, whose purpose was to pay for the construction of the newschool at Harvard Avenue and East Roy Street.In a 1914 letter, the secretary of the Seattle Fine Arts Society (SFAS) opened awindow on the local fine arts scene: “Only just recently has any light been shown on thesituation. We have been a very flourishing little group, now 350 in number. . . . The artproducers have been the back-bone of the organization with the added group of art patrons.”The Seattle Fine Arts Society had formed in 1908. Among its first activities was sponsoringlectures by knowledgeable city residents and visitors. The society’s emphasis seems tohave been on Asian art and American prints. To foster art appreciation, the society joinedwith other groups in Pacific Coast cities that were equally remote from art organizationsand galleries to form a circuit to share the cost of traveling exhibits. The SFAS attended the1912 meeting of the American Federation of Art. The federation said that it hoped to “makecircuits” to the Pacific Coast, providing that someone could arrange them. The federationcontacted societies in other coastal cities as well. The SFAS joined the federation that yearand received about fifteen paintings for exhibit at a cost of five hundred dollars. The societysold some of the paintings, earning a ten percent commission. This became the standardpractice for traveling exhibits on the coast.

60 Part OneDuring this period the Society of Seattle Artists formed to put on exhibits of localart. Its ninth annual exhibit earned the praise of the Town Crier’s art critic, Helen Ross,who called it the “best ever” for showing the work of local painters who had been studyingabroad. Instead of the usual local landscape scenes, there were European ones. The Societyof Seattle Artists merged with the Seattle Fine Arts Society in 1914, and the Town Crierbecame the new organization’s official organ. The organization kept the name of SeattleFine Arts Society. The SFAS began leasing space downtown for exhibits, each time leasinga larger space, before finding a permanent home in 1917 in the Metropolitan Tract at FourthAvenue and University Street. Promotion of the fine arts was clearly going to have tobe more dependent on resources outside the region than was the promotion of popularentertainment and classical music.EducationPublic education in Seattle was broadly supported from 1900 to 1920. However,such support is not surprising, given the unprecedented influx of newcomers who werein the prime of life and who brought with them high expectations. Bryce E. Nelson, ahistorian of Seattle’s public schools, says that the system was “exemplary” compared withthose in the rest of the nation. Seattle’s school superintendent from 1901 to 1922 was FrankB. Cooper. Arriving when he did, Cooper was able to build the system as the city grew.For this reason, Seattle’s school system contrasted with systems that had been establishedearlier, where ethnic and religious rigidity and political patronage penetrated every aspectof public schooling, from contracts for construction and maintenance to staffing andeducation policies. Dedication in 1906 of the Carnegie Library downtown, followed by itsfirst branch in Ballard in 1908, then others in Green Lake, West Seattle and the UniversityDistrict buttressed Cooper’s school reforms.According to Nelson, in Seattle “school supporters elected civic-mindedprogressives to the Board” and “taxpayers approved substantial school bond issues as partof the investment necessary to make Seattle a desirable place to live.” School constructionkept up with population growth and good teachers were attracted to the schools because theWhen the long-anticipated Carnegie Library opened on 19 December, 1906, a wide stairway led directly from thefront door to a narrow and scarcely improved Fourth Avenue. Soon, however, the general early-century regradingof business district streets reached Fourth, and in 1908 the library block was lowered ten feet at its intersectionwith Madison Street (in the foreground of both views) and twelve feet one block north at Spring Street. Whileadding a story to the library, the changes also eliminated the library’s “front lawn” and required a grand stairwaythat ascended parallel with the street and the west façade of the landmark library.

Educationsuperintendent gave them the freedom to create an inventive curriculum. Not surprisingly,the schools had high attendance. There were twenty-six schools in 1902 and seventy by1912, the student-to-teacher ratio in 1902 was 46 to 1 but 32 to 1 by 1912, and teachers’salaries averaged $793 in 1902 and $1,126 in 1912.The public schools fulfilled the needs of the middle-class newcomers, who soughtfriendly neighborhoods with an elementary school and playground or park in which toestablish their families. The “upper class”of labor must be included in this socialcategory. Together, these upwardly mobilegroups worked to gain access to economicopportunities and social amenitiesthat the watchdogs of the powerfuldowntown interests on the school boardguarded against. Social services rankedCourtesy, Seattle Public Schools ArchiveDuring the city’s boom years following the Great Fireof 1889 many working families found homes in theneighborhood at the south end of Lake Union. CascadeSchool opened for their children in 1894 and theneighborhood adopted the name for itself. During thecity’s boom years the school was enlarged twice, first in1898 and again in 1904 for a whopping enrollment thatyear of 949 pupils. Cascade School was also blessedwhen Charles Fagan became its third principal in 1900.Noted for both his sense of humor and sensitivity, Faganserved Cascade for 33 years.Courtesy, Ballard Historical SocietyA boom in school construction came inevitably withSeattle’s extensive 1907 annexations in 1907 of ColumbiaCity, West Seattle, and Ballard. With the Adams Schoolin Ballard (1910) the school district used a T-shapedenlargement of its popular Jacobean-styled red brickand terra-cotta tile model. Colman School in the RainierValley is nearly its twin. And with Adams the schoolboard also cooperated with the Seattle Park Departmentin developing the rest of the site’s double block for aplayfield in the spirit of the then popular “playgroundmovement.”61high on these board members’ lists ofunnecessary expenditures. Recognizingthe relationship between good healthand learning, Cooper initiated a freeand reduced-price milk program thatpreserved the anonymity of its recipients.He had to defend this program throughouthis tenure.A teacher’s tenure tended tobe long. However, if a female teachermarried, she was summarily dismissed.Apparently the act of marrying causedfemale teachers to fall from grace;married male teachers were presumedto be free of taint. Most grammarschool teachers were women. The payfor grammar school teachers was lowerthan that for high school teachers, wheremales predominated. And female highschool teachers were paid less than theirmale counterparts. The board’s operatingprinciple was “[N]o male candidate ofacceptable rating is denied.” Yet duringthe years 1910 and 1911, four times asmany women as men applied for teachingjobs.The school board was a severemoral taskmaster. Teachers founddrinking or smoking in public weresubject to disciplinary action. Sick leave

62 Part OnePortrait courtesy of SeattlePublic Schools ArchiveFrank B. Cooper,Superintendent of SeattlePublic Schools.pay was grudgingly granted, even when the compensation was atone-half the normal pay. Cooper fought unsuccessfully to strikedown the rule that prohibited teachers from holding other jobswhile school was out of session, including summer vacation. In1919 two teachers who refused to remove notes protesting thisrule from their locker doors were fired. The board gave few payraises, despite the fact that the system had adequate funds. Thereason? Such pay raises were “inexpedient.” These poor workingconditions persisted because the board could count on easilyreplacing teachers when they resigned.Mean-spirited personnel policies were not unique toSeattle’s school board; it was Cooper who made Seattle’s schoolsystem different. Cooper earned the loyalty of the teachers byworking cooperatively with them and with principals in curriculummatters. Pilot programs were often mounted to test the results of these changes to thecurriculum. Cooper’s national reputationCourtesy, Seattle Public Schools Archives.Two examples of specialty classrooms—one foraccounting and the other for wood working—used bySeattle Public Schools during the early twentieth centuryprogressive period.Courtesy, Seattle Public Schools Archives.attracted top-rated teachers from othercities. Fortunately, the board allowed himconsiderable freedom in determining thecurriculum at that time.In 1903 the state legislaturemade school attendance compulsoryfor children between the ages of eightand fifteen. Pupils found a curriculumin which music, art, physical education,manual training, and domestic sciencewere highly regarded; these subjects weretaught not as career tracks but as lifeenrichinglearning experiences. Underpressure from the Seattle Federationof Women’s Clubs, Cooper institutedspecial classes for children who werephysically impaired or who had behaviorproblems. Night Schools were started in1902, reportedly upon Cooper’s receipt ofa letter from a “working boy.” Sensitiveto the needs of poor families, in whichteenagers often worked during the day,he introduced an evening class in 1907whose curriculum was parallel to the highschool’s. Cooper’s policies came understeady fire before and during World WarI in the context of superpatriotism andanti–civil rights hysteria.

Courtesy, Museum of History and IndustryEducation63The 1902 addition of the lessadorned Science Hall on theleft to the original and moreornate Administration Building(Denny Hall) on the right wasa compromise between theUniversity of Washington’s needfor more classrooms and the statelegislature’s reluctance to supportthe institution, although the studentbody had tripled since the school’s1895 encampment north of PortageBay. Science Hall was renamedParrington Hall after the PulitzerPrize winning English professorVernon Parrington’s death in 1929.In 1895 the University of Washington moved from its original ten-acre tract indowntown Seattle to the shore of Lake Washington at Union Bay, the periphery of the city,where the grounds were covered by virgin timber. Franklin P. Graves became the university’spresident in 1898; he aimed to upgrade the university’s curriculum to accreditable standardsand he began recruiting faculty with doctoral degrees. One doctorate whom Graves hadinherited, J. Allen Smith, soon attracted national attention for his revisionist interpretationof the U.S. Constitution and his publications on municipal government. He was oftenembroiled in controversy because of his leadership of the city’s municipal ownership forcesand his support of worker unionization.Graves added three more professors with doctoral degrees to the faculty: HoraceByers (chemistry), Thomas F. Kane (Latin), and Frederick M. Padelford (English). Heestablished five schools—liberal arts, mines, law, engineering, and pharmacy—as well asa graduate school. Graves added four new buildings: two dormitories, a science building,and a powerhouse. He resigned under pressure from the regents in 1902, but not beforetripling the size of the student body from 200 to 600. Still, the university was not integratedwith the city.Thomas Kane replaced Graves after briefly serving as acting president. During hisshort tenure on the faculty, Kane had recognized the importance of the marine environmentto the area. So when he established a marine biology laboratory in 1904 at Friday Harbor onSan Juan Island, he moved the university closer to integration with the wider community.He took another step in this direction—a step that endeared him to the legislature—when heestablished a timber testing station. The station paved the way for the legislature’s approvalof a school of forestry and a domestic science program.The legislature usually resisted requests for construction funds. Luckily, theuniversity was able to acquire twenty-three of the vacant buildings that had been constructedfor the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Because of Kane’s efforts and because it hadhosted the popular exposition, the university became more fully integrated with city life.However, legislators and the downtown establishment could easily be unsettledby any kind of political activism on campus, whether it be instigated by the faculty orstudents. Tensions at the university first arose in late 1909 when the regents endorsed arequest by the Seattle Electric Company to build a trestle for its cars across the campus. A

64 Part Onepetition drive during 1910 forced the city council in 1911 to reroute the trestle to the edgeof campus. Student activism mounted in 1911, beginning with the students’ involvement inthe campaign to recall the mayor, Hiram “Hi” Gill.To the dismay of the downtown establishment, that same spring faculty and studentsenthusiastically greeted Theodore Roosevelt just as the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy wasreaching a crescendo. Seattle’s Ballinger carried with him the blessing of the city’s businesselite to the other Washington when he was appointed secretary of the interior. Shortly afterhe took office, he reopened public lands with potential water-power sites for patenting.Gifford Pinchot, the head of the Forest Service, alleged that Ballinger had favored aparticular group of investors in the patenting of claims to Alaskan coal lands. PresidentWilliam Howard Taft then fired Pinchot. As Roosevelt’s man in the Taft administration,Pinchot had won the admiration of J. Allen Smith and his protégé Theresa McMahon;many students took their cues from them.In 1912, after Alden Blethen,publisher of The Seattle Times,donated a set of twelve tuned bellsto the University of Washington, theschool’s unadorned water tower wasgiven a rustic remodel to hold them.The association of the chimes withthe controversial Times publisherdid not last much longer than theprotests and student parodies (likethe one printed here) that werearoused by his gift. Instead, thename of a blind musician becametied to the campus chimes. AfterGeorge Bailey graduated from theUniversity’s School of Music heplayed the chimes for thirty-twoyears until 1949, when the towerwas destroyed by fire and thetwelve bells crashed to the ground.

Education 65Later that year, male students loudly voiced their opposition to the legislature’smilitary drill act. Disturbed by this apparent disrespect for their political authority, theboard of regents passed a resolution at its December 1911 meeting barring nonstudentsfrom speaking on campus. Somewhat innocently they also voted to accept chimes from aformer regent, the Seattle Times publisher Alden Blethen, whom the students loved to hate.Kane defended the students’ right to hear different political views expressed on campus.But, as the 1912 presidential campaign heated up, Kane backtracked and banned all politicalspeakers.In this charged atmosphere, the Blethen chimes issue fused with the November1912 election campaign. A letter signed by fifty students protested acceptance of the chimes;it was about to be published by the University of Washington Daily when Kane stoppedthe publication of the paper and suspended its editor. Students then published the protestletter in pamphlet form and distributed it among guests attending the dedication ceremonyof the chimes. The fat was in the fire. To Kane’s dismay, however, the faculty disciplinarycommittee merely reprimanded the students involved in passing out the pamphlets andplaced them on probation. The controversy then spilled over into city politics. The NationalCongress of Mothers and the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) sent letters to the outgoinggovernor, Marion Hay, and to the incoming governor, Ernest Lister, questioning the moralcondition of Blethen and voicing their fear that the university would be placed in his debt.The letter also congratulated the students for their “fine discrimination” in objecting to theacceptance of the chimes. Nonetheless, the chimes remained and Kane earned the wrathof Blethen for allowing the affair to get out of control. At the same time, the faculty andstudents lost confidence in Kane because of his gag rule. From this point on, the Universityof Washington’s destiny was bound together with the city’s, and academic freedom wouldremain at risk.

66 Part TwoPart TwoCity Politics, 1904–1912: Progressivism EmergesAs it had earlier, the railroad lobby continued unabashedly to dominate state politicsduring this period, chiefly through James Hill’s Washington Political Bureau, headed by J.D. Farrell, whose control of legislators was notorious. Until the 1904 election of Farrell’sgubernatorial choice, Albert Mead, the lobby had managed to block the establishment ofa railroad commission. When the legislature established one, Mead dutifully appointedcommission members who were not to take their mission too seriously. It was not uncommonat this time for legislators to directly represent their own business interests, as did manyin the forest products and utilities industries, reinforcing the legislature’s conservative—business bloc.As elsewhere, in Washington State liberal members of both major parties joinedforces to overcome the conservatives by passing several pieces of reform legislation. WithinSeattle, reform forces coalesced to form short-lived organizations such as the Citizens’Non-Partisan League, the Municipal Ownership Party, the Civic Union, the Workingmen’sParty, and the Public Welfare League. These ephemeral groupings focused on specific issues,such as establishing municipally owned utilities for water, electricity, and street railwaysand funding public parks, schools, and other public amenities. However, it was often theThe raising of three skyscraperson Second Avenue symbolized thegeneral buoyancy and optimismof pre-WWI Seattle. All three,the Alaska Building, the HogeBuilding, and the Smith Tower,are seen or implied in this viewtaken from the Hoge not long afterthe Smith Tower, far right, wasdedicated on 4 July, 1914. TheTower’s owners counted fortytwostories—a number stretchedsome in the pyramid top to itsslender tower. Completed in 1904,the Alaska Building, on the left atthe southeast corner of CherryStreet and Second Avenue, wasthe first high-rise constructed inSeattle with reinforced steel. Kittycornerto the Alaska Building, theHoge Building quickly reachedeighteen floors in 1911. It wasbuilt with startling speed in lessthan one year filling the cornerwhere only fifty-nine years earlierCarson Boren assembled the firstresidence in Seattle from splitcedar logs. As evidence thatSeattle was a prime example of a“western American boomtown,”the 88-year-old pioneer was stillliving in the area when the HogeBuilding was completed.

City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism Emergesissue of whether Seattle should be an open town or a closed town that ignited these reformforces. Vice in the form of prostitution, liquor, and illegal gambling—most under sometype of political and police protection—riveted the public’s attention in the early yearsof the century. Reformers often found that their opponents on vice issues were the sameparties who fought them on municipal ownership, home rule, regulation of child labor andwomen’s working hours, workers’ compensation, the popular election of U.S. senators, andwoman suffrage. Political reform began to change the way politics was practiced.After the grand jury investigation of 1903 revealed the extensive corruption in theadministration of Mayor Humes and the police department, Seattle was ready to becomea closed town. The straitlaced Richard Ballinger—the future U.S. land commissionerand interior secretary—succeeded Humes in 1904, but according to the Argus only inhis last days as mayor did Ballinger even slightly close down vice operations in the city.(Throughout his mayorship, he also opposed municipal ownership and labor unions.)His failure inspired both of the mayoral candidates in the 1906 election to run on closedtown planks. The Democrat William Hickman Moore, with the backing of the MunicipalOwnership Party and the Ministerial Federation, defeated the Republican John Riplingerby a bare fifteen votes. Harry Chadwick attributed Moore’s victory to “the labor vote whichbelieves in municipal ownership.” Many of these workingmen lived in the north end, an areaceaselessly fighting for the extension and improvement of utility services. Not surprisingly,Moore lost the First Ward, which was south of the deadline (the restricted district). EvenAlden Blethen supported Moore, allegedly because he promised Blethen that he would fireR. H. Thomson from his position as city engineer. While Moore was mayor, a law requiringbusinesses to close on Sunday passed and voters approved a recall measure, which wouldfirst be exercised in 1911 to recall Mayor Gill.Moore, like Ballinger before him, did not close down gambling houses until thewaning days of his administration in 1908. He had closed saloons on Sundays, however,as a gesture to the prohibition forces, which had not endeared him to blue-collar workers.Moore had further alienated much of his labor vote by opposing the Socialist Party’s freespeech movement in 1906 to 1907. During the 1908 city election, the Municipal Ownership67With the city depicted in his shadowand a book titled “MunicipalOwnership” in one hand, WilliamHickman Moore gestures with hisother hand towards the sunrise (orsunset, it cannot be determined)of “realization” that is on the farside of a stormy sea and the rocksof “success.” This congestedpolitical caricature appears in theArgus cartoons (1906), publishedby H. A. Chadwick. The secondArgus cartoon has Moore barelyholding the lid down on both thespread of prostitution north of the“deadline” and the “blind pigs.”

68 Part TwoParty became the City Party as the reformerscoalesced to fight for more direct legislation toundermine the control that corporations had overcity government. To achieve this objective, theSeattle Star’s Joe Smith organized the DirectLegislation League. The league mounted a petitiondrive that forced the city council to include onthe ballot propositions to allow initiatives andreferenda. These propositions were allied withone that would require that franchise agreementsbe submitted to voters by referendum. Votersin outlying districts overwhelmingly supportedthese propositions, allegedly because the privateutilities had neglected them. Attesting to thespreading popularity of municipal ownership,one Seattle Electric Company official said, “Iam afraid we will have to do something for thissection the first of the year.” Writing again inDecember 1909, after the Alaska-Yukon-PacificExposition, the same official declared, “There isa very strong attempt on the part of the real estatepromoters and business people to have us extendmany of our lines and open up new territory.”Police Chief Charles Wappenstein sendscriminals scampering for the “tall timber”in another cartoon from the Argus book ofcaricatures, "Men Behind the Seattle Spirit."As for the 1908 mayoral race, John F. Miller, with the backing of the P-I,overwhelmed Moore by five thousand votes, despite the fact that both the Star and theTimes supported Moore. The Times supported the incumbent because he had promisedBlethen he would appoint Charles Wappenstein police chief. The latter, nicknamed Wappy,and the colonel were close friends.When appealing for the moral vote, Miller had promised to rid the city of therestricted district. Once in office, however, he said that the closure would “take some timeto accomplish” because it would “be necessary to house the unfortunates who constitutethe colony.” Two months later he promised to at least close the “lowest houses” whileconceding that there might be a need to put the restricted district “somewhere.” HarryChadwick chided him for not closing those houses north of the deadline as a start. There,Chadwick claimed, “assignation houses [are] everywhere. There are restaurants withclosed boxes, and lodging houses above easily reached by back stairways.” Because of thisprodding, Miller set 1 September as the date he would close these houses down, hopingthat the colony’s denizens would choose to leave in the meantime. They did move, but onlyuptown. According to Chadwick, “some four hundred of the most disreputable” moved tothe lodging-house and residential sections. Chadwick observed that “crib houses” (lodginghouses) were renamed “parlor houses.” Missing his September deadline, Miller then chose1 December. As was to be expected, the police department came under criticism, so he firedWappenstein. Reportedly, the department was demoralized, just in time for the 1910 cityelection.

The bantam Hiram Gill in profile and caricaturewith his corncob pipe, from Frank Calvert’sThe Cartoon, A Reference Book Of Seattle’sSuccessful Men, with Decorations By TheSeattle Cartoonists’ Club, 1911.City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism Emerges69Mayor Miller’s failure to manage therestricted district made vice the major campaignissue once again. The mayoral race was essentiallybetween two Republicans: the city councilpresident, Hiram Gill, and A. V. Bouillion of theBoard of Public Works, a known reformer. Gillhad consistently opposed municipal ownership,taxes for city projects, and labor unions. Thechairman of Gill’s campaign finance committeewas Miller Freeman, publisher of the TownCrier and various trade publications. To fend offsuspicions that special interests might benefitfrom Gill’s election, Freeman declared, “Thelarge number of business men who are workingfor . . . Gill should guarantee that the campaignwould be conducted on clean lines. The attacks[on] Mr. Gill are an insult to every decent citizenof Seattle.” Gill himself professed hurt innocence:“I don’t understand . . . why everyone seems tothink that the day after my election I am goingto open a dance hall and faro bank on PioneerSquare, and keep it running all night for the next two years.” These witticisms colored acampaign that most voters hardly took seriously.The clergy did take it seriously, however, and led the attack on Gill. The ReverendMark A. Matthews pledged his First Presbyterian Church congregation of 1,763 votersto Bouillion. The Reverend George Cairns of Temple Baptist Church also urged hiscongregation to line up for Bouillion. The Seattle Federation of Women’s Clubs joinedBouillion’s camp and succeeded after the primary in forcing the closure of the DreamlandDance Hall at Seventh Avenue and Union Street. Located one block from the Union Temple,the Dreamland was often used byunions for staging large events, bothpolitical and social; consequently ithad a “reputation.” Gill defeated hisRepublican opponent in the primary bya vote of 17,436 to 14,299. The formermayor William Hickman Moore wonthe Democratic nomination with apaltry 1,536 votes. Bouillion swunghis following—seemingly all of it—to Moore’s side, but Gill defeatedMoore by a vote of 18,012 to 14,703.Republicans also won all open councilseats.First Presbyterian Preacher-PoliticoMark A. MatthewsCredit UW Libraries, Special Collections

70 Part TwoThe 1910 election brought out more votersthan ever before. More important, the city charter wasamended: the ward system of representation was replacedby an at-large system. Burton Hendrick of McClure’sMagazine believed that the election results gave “almosta legal standing” to the vice concessionaires, inasmuch asGill had campaigned for a segregated restricted district.He identified Gill’s supporters as the “Public UtilityCorporations,” bankers, and the Times, Argus, and TownCrier. Meanwhile, Gill claimed that the restricted districtwould be “the most quiet place in Seattle” and would belocated in a place where men would “have to go out oftheir way to find it.”Gill’s election coalesced the reform groupsas nothing had previously. Just three months after theelection, on 16 June 1910, they gathered together at theSeattle Commercial Club under the banner of the PublicWelfare League. The Commercial Club itself supportedmunicipal ownership of utilities, public amenities, andDreamland Dance Hall (and beyondit the tower to Seattle’s firstUnitarian church) at the northeastcorner of Seventh and Union. Thepopular dance pavilion and meetinghall was replaced in 1925 by theEagles Auditorium, which was laterincorporated into the WashingtonState Convention Center, and at thiswriting is home to ACT Theatre.moral uplift. The club also had the reputation of opposing any measure that the chamber ofcommerce favored.In its articles of incorporation, the Public Welfare League vowed to “advocate,encourage, assist and procure the enforcement of the laws in King County and ordinancesin . . . Seattle; to secure suppression of public vice, [to conserve] the morals of the young;to encourage honesty and efficiency in public service; to secure economy and fidelity inthe disposition of public funds; to secure the punishment of all officials who neglect toenforce the laws . . . [and] to invoke the recall against all city officials who violate theiroath of public office.” The last clause seems to have been written with Gill specificallyin mind. An organization called the Clean City merged with the league, bringing with itthree reports resulting from its investigations of city corruption. The Ministerial FederationTo set the record nearly straight,this by now familiar bordello sceneis almost certainly not what isclaimed for it. It is not a portraitof Seattle’s most famous boomtimemadame, Lou Graham, posingwith her “girls” in their sumptuousbordello parlor at Third AvenueSouth and Washington Street.Graham arrived in Seattle in 1888and “served” here until her deathin 1903. The original negativefor this Seattle scene is part of acollection of glass plates—all ofSeattle subjects—that date fromaround 1910.

City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism EmergesCourtesy Grace McAdamsMax Loudon’s somewhat naughty alley portraits ofperformers in Seattle variety at least parodies the “publicvice” in early twentieth-century Seattle.71lent its influential support, and ReverendMark Matthews led his huge Presbyteriancongregation into the field. Thesemergers spawned a single organization,the Municipal League, which lent asemblance of permanence to the reformelements.Seattle was not alone on thePacific Coast in combating politicalcorruption at this time. However, inSeattle the labor unions were on the sideof the reformers, while San Francisco’scorruption, as detailed by the historianWalton Bean, resulted from an alliancebetween the Union Labor Party and theleading businesses of the city; the twogroups were connected by sweetheartfranchises. Los Angeles’s corruption stemmed from the domination of the city’s leadingbusiness interests: the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times and the real-estate promoterHenry Huntington (son of Southern Pacific’s Collis Huntington) as well as other developers.Los Angeles was also a notorious open shop town. Portland’s corruption resembled that ofLos Angeles, although its business leaders, according to the Portland historian E. KimbarkMacColl, appear to have operated less imaginatively and within more modest geographicalconstraints. Nationwide, political corruption was being exposed by muckrakers, the mostfamous of whom were Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. Burton Hendrick was one of themore prominent Seattle muckrakers.The year 1911 marked a high point for reform both at the city and state level. Anamendment to the state constitution that gave women the right to vote and hold electiveoffice had passed on 11 November 1910, infusing the reform movement with muchneeded voting power. This law was enacted just as a campaign to recall Mayor Gill wasreaching a crescendo. A long-fought workers’ compensation bill and a bill enabling theformation of port districts also passed. The Washington State Public Service Commissionreplaced the Washington State Railroad Commission, although it lacked the authority toregulate municipally owned utilities. Underlying this surge of support for reform was theexpectation that Seattle would benefit from an expansion of trade upon completion of thePanama Canal: elements in the business community who were normally hostile to reformof any kind supported some of the reform efforts, most notably workers’ compensation andthe port district bill.The Municipal League, unlike the single-issue and single-election organizations ofthe past, aimed to be permanent, and it therefore addressed a broad spectrum of civic issuesand problems. In keeping with this ambition, the league sought to draw into its all-malemembership a wide range of professionals, clergymen, small-business owners, and laborleaders, including even officeholders. Together, these men hoped to confront the city’sproblems in a rational, “efficient,” and nonpartisan way. Committees were established for

72 Part Twohealth, sanitation, utilities, harbor development, city budget, and city planning.Most league members were Republican. About one-half had migrated to Seattlefrom the northeastern United States, and the rest came mainly from the Midwest. Most werecomfortably middle class and supported restrained free enterprise, as well as efficiencyand economy in city government. League members believed that businesses and laborunions that had corrupt alliances or abused franchise terms had to be regulated. Of primaryimportance, the Municipal League strongly supported the public ownership of utilities.During the 1920s the league repeatedly defended City Light’s Skagit power project and itssuperintendent James D. Ross. The league focused on implementing a city manager formof government, under the guise of achieving “efficiency.”Reflecting the league’s broad membership base were Reverend Mark Matthews, thesocial gospeler Sydney Dix Strong, Rabbi Samuel Koch, the engineers R. H. Thomson andGeorge Cotterill, the muckraking journalist Joe Smith, and the attorney James Haight. Theleague’s first president was the Bull Mooser Clement J. France, legal counsel for the Port ofSeattle. Other notables were Austin E. Griffiths (the “father of Seattle’s playgrounds” andlater a city councilman); the university’s municipal government expert, J. Allen Smith; andthe small-business owner and city councilman Oliver Erickson.Hiram Gill’s election and the flagrant implementation of his open town promisesignited the reformers. Gill, whom Alden Blethen had previously opposed, now wonthe colonel’s support by reappointing Blethen’s loyal friend Charles Wappenstein chiefof police. During his two previous stints as chief, Wappy had earned a reputation as acommitted grafter. Based partly on Gideon Tupper’s grand jury testimony, the historianMurray Morgan writes that Wappy met Tupper and Clarence Gerald, both well-knownracketeers, at the latter’s bar in 1910 and that the chief convinced Tupper to lease onecrib house with more than one hundred rooms. Prostitutes agreed to pay them ten dollarsa month to be allowed to keep working; that was the main source of Wappy’s kickback.Tupper leased another crib house on the same terms. To prevent cheating on the agreement,the police kept a record of the five hundred known prostitutes. Tupper regulated the brothels,while Gerald took responsibility for most of the gambling operations. Almost giddy withsuccess, they bought the Northern Club, which was primarily a gambling enterprise, andunabashedly ran it as if it were a carnival.The wide circulation of thisphotograph of a sprawling brothelbuilt on the west slope of BeaconHill was used in the successfulrecall campaign against MayorHi Gill. The great majority ofnewly enfranchised women votersbelieved that “his dishonor” hadallowed or even encouraged itsconstruction.

City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism EmergesThat Seattle was now wide open did not escape notice. Nationwide publicity duringthese early months of 1910 attracted both syndicate and independent vice operators. Brothelswere allowed to operate uptown, outside the restricted district, as long as their ownerspaid off police. As Burton Hendrick reported in McClure’s Magazine, “The city seemed tohave been transformed almost magically into one great gambling hell. All kinds of gamessimultaneously started up, in full public view. Cigar stores and barbershops did a livelybusiness in crap-shooting and race-track gambling, drawing their patronage largely fromschool boys and department store girls. . . . All over the city ‘flat joints’, pay-off stations,and dart-shooting galleries were reaping a rapid harvest . . . in the thirty or forty gamblingplacesopened under the administration of Hi Gill.” In a fit of euphoria, Tupper and Geraldincorporated the Hillside Improvement Company to build a huge structure on Beacon Hill.Because the acreage at the site was insufficient, they won permission from the compliantcity council to lease eighty adjoining acres that were presently occupied by a city street.The council granted a fifteen-year lease to the builders. The partners sold stock locally tofinance construction. Erastus Brainerd, editor of the P-I, announced: “Gillism has allowedthe enforcers of law and order to enter into lewd partnership with breakers of the law. . . .It has fostered and encouraged a species of government and official favoritism wholly atvariance with the spirit and genius of American political institutions and American law.”The Star castigated “Gillism.” The Argus’s Chadwick declared Seattle, nevertheless, stillthe cleanest city on the coast. He also noted sarcastically that the downtown establishmentwithdrew its support of Gill only after the mayor announced that he was in favor ofmunicipally owned docks. The dock owner Laurence Colman, chairman of the campaignto recall Gill, symbolized thischange in allegiance.On 8 October the PublicWelfare League began distributingrecall petitions. Meanwhile,Gill left for Alaska on a yachtowned by a known gamblinghouseoperator. The city councilpresident, William Murphy,sought cover in Idaho. MaxWardall ascended to Murphy’sseat and became acting mayor aswell. The Public Welfare Leaguepresented Wardall the reportsthat it had begun preparingonce it realized that Gill wouldachieve his goal of opening thetown. Upon reading the reports,Wardall suspended WappensteinA Gill Street rally at the Grand Opera Houseon Cherry was one of the many but futilestrategies used by the mayor’s supportersin the struggle to prevent his recall.73

74 Part Twoand ordered the actingchief to close downseveral particularlyoffensive operations. Thecouncil then establishedits own investigatingcommittee. When Gillreturned to Seattle, hereinstated Wappenstein.And when the recallpetitioners gatheredsufficient signatures, Gillapplied to the circuit courtjudge Cornelius Hanfordfor an injunction. Thejudge obliged but wasoverruled on appeal. Therecall campaign gatheredCourtesy UW Libraries, Special CollectionsNot yet two months in office, Mayor George W. Dilling hosted the “trustbuster” Theodore Roosevelt to Seattle for a 6 April, 1911 speech at theUniversity of Washington.steam. The Public Welfare League thwarted Gill’s strategy of having the recall electionheld before women could vote by withholding delivery of its recall petitions until mid-December; women had won the right to vote in November. The league then chose one ofits own members to run against Gill: George W. Dilling, a real-estate man of progressivereputation.Promotion of vice and corruption was only one of the charges leveled againstGill. City Light figured in the charges as well. Gill had appointed Richard Arms, a formersuperintendent of the Seattle Electric Company, to direct City Light. Arms proceeded tolose the contract to light Ballard streets even though City Light had already set up the poles.He also rejected several lucrative contracts and extended service to only one outlying area.These acts of apparent misfeasance were reported to the city council, adding to Gill’s woes.If Dilling became mayor, he reportedly planned to fire Arms for “ruining the business of theCity Lighting Plant” while promoting that of his former employer.Women, united by the Seattle Federation of Women’s Clubs, played a major rolein the 1911 recall election. Dilling’s victory by 6,000 votes proved the importance of theirvote. Of the 23,000 registered women, 20,000 voted. In its national survey, the LiteraryDigest found that most people believed that Gill’s defeat was due to the female vote. TheOregonian declared, “[I]t was proved that the so-called business man who believes thatgambling, drinking, prostitution, and free-and-easy public conscience spell industrialprosperity, is grossly mistaken.”After a grand jury heard all the evidence gathered by the William J. Burns DetectiveAgency, the public’s attention turned to Wappenstein. The grand jury indicted him, thoughBlethen strenuously tried to defend him. While Wappy’s trial proceeded, Colonel Blethenfiled a $100,000 libel suit against Brainerd and the P-I, all the while being trailed by theBurns Agency’s detectives, who had been hired by Reverend Mark Matthews to look forincriminating evidence for the upcoming trials of Alden and his son Clarence. (This is

City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism Emergesall covered in the Blethen biography by Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy.) Thegrand jury then indicted the Blethens and the Times Printing Company for libeling citycouncilmen and conspiring to protect illegal gambling, prostitution, and the liquor trade.Others were indicted as well; the list was long. Wappy went to the state penitentiary, as didTupper and Gerald. In seeking to clean up his reputation, the colonel donated the chimesto the UW that caused the student protests. The students drew their ammunition againstBlethen from the grand jury revelations. More setbacks for the colonel would follow.Mayor Dilling, in finishing Gill’s term in office, concentrated on reorganizing thepolice and lighting departments. Dilling could hardly have found a more incorruptiblepolice chief than Wappenstein’s replacement, Claude Bannick. He moved with suchvigor in closing down the vice establishments that Dilling, at the urging of the downtownestablishment, asked him to relax his “iron hand a bit.” Bannick made Dilling back downby insisting that the mayor put the request in writing. Bannick stayed on through theadministration of Dilling’s successor, George Cotterill.75The Wednesday evening 8 February, 1911 Seattle Times portrays a heroic but yet humble Dilling.

76 Part TwoCourtesy: Seattle Public ArchivesAt work behind a desk crowded with flowers and reports,the beaming J.D. Ross liked being Seattle City LightSuperintendent.Dilling removed Richard Armsfrom his position as superintendent ofCity Light and replaced him with thedepartment’s chief lighting engineer, J. D.Ross. Ross held this position until his deathin 1939. Also after his 1937 appointmentby President Franklin D. Roosevelt as thefirst administrator of the Bonneville PowerAdministration (BPA), Ross concluded hiscareer as a leading public power advocatein Seattle, the region, and the nation. Hismain adversary through the years wasthe Seattle Electric Company and itssuccessors—Puget Sound Traction, Powerand Light Company and Puget SoundPower and Light Company (PSP&L). The company took the latter name after it sold thetraction component to the city in 1919. Though its name changed, the company continuedto be operated by Stone and Webster.When the 1911 state legislature framed the bill to create a public servicecommission, the Seattle Electric Company had Senator David H. Cox introduce a bill toplace municipally owned utilities under the jurisdiction of the new commission. This wasthe national strategy recommended by the National Electric Light Association to blockmunicipal ownership. The SEC and Cox were unsuccessful, for the final bill exemptedmunicipally owned utilities. Obstructed by the home-rule forces in the legislature, thecompany then tried unsuccessfully to exploit the incipient rivalry between Ross and thecity councilman Oliver Erickson, who had been voted induring the first at-large election. Over Ross’s objections,Erickson had introduced an ordinance in May 1911 toreduce residential electric rates. City Light was alreadyselling at a loss to residential customers, but Ross wasmaking up the difference through commercial sales oflight and power. Ross reluctantly agreed to a smallerrate reduction. Hoping to use this rift to their advantage,Seattle Electric Company officials sought Ross’s supportin their effort to amend the recently passed PublicService Commission Act. Ross refused to help, becausehe was not yet secure in his new position and because hewould need Erickson’s support in the future. However,the rivalry between the two men continued until 1932,when Erickson lost his reelection bid.To increase City Light’s share of the market,Dilling instructed Ross to go after downtown customersand appointed two additional solicitors to stalk the area; healso encouraged Ross to extend power lines into BallardCourtesy: UW Libraries,Special CollectionsLong-time Seattle City Councilmember Oliver Erickson, a frequentrival of Ross.

City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism Emergesand Georgetown. Seattle Electric Company officialstook a tour of City Light’s Cedar River plant in August1911 that was led by Dilling. Afterward, they wroteadulatory memoranda to fellow officers about Ross’stechnical innovations and management. Though it mighthave been jealous of City Light’s accomplishments, thecompany gave Dilling high marks, calling him “one ofthe best mayors Seattle has ever had.” When a frivolousrecall movement was started against the mayor and fourcouncilmen, the company rallied to Dilling’s defense.While Dilling was minding the store, other eventstook place that would affect the city election in March1912. On 1 September 1911, construction started on theLake Washington Ship Canal, ending a bitter contest toCourtesy, Rainier Clubbe outlined below. One week later, in a special election,citizens overwhelmingly voted to establish the Port ofSeattle and a port commission, whose three members John F. Douglasquickly went to work on a plan for port development.The Municipal Plans Commission presented a comprehensive city plan developed by thecivil engineer Virgil Bogue to the city council. The council accepted the Bogue Plan duringthe last week of September for inclusion on the March 1912 ballot. At the end of the year,the chamber of commerce engineered a rival plan with Harbor Island at its center.Another vital change quietly took place downtown between 1909 and 1912.Under the leadership of John F. Douglas’s Metropolitan Building Company (MBC), theUniversity of Washington’s downtown tract had become the effective city center by 1912.This development diminished a potential base of support for the Bogue Plan, which woulddevelop the Denny Regrade, north of the existing center. Neither the occupants of the tractnor its owners saw any benefit in supporting the plan.When it was completed in 1910 the Cobb Building, left of center, at the northwest corner of Fourth Avenue andUniversity Street was the first dedicated medical-dental building in the West with more than 200 offices. Rightof center, the White Building (at Union Street), and the Henry Building (mid-block) were completed in 1909. Theaddition of the Stuart Building (at University Street) in 1915 created a nearly uniform façade of eleven-storybusiness blocks along the east sideof Fourth Avenue. Referredto as one building, the White-Courtesy, Museum of History and IndustryHenry-Stuart, the block surviveduntil 1977 when it was razed forconstruction of Rainier Squareand its modern tower. The CobbBuilding, however, survives asa distinguished vestige of theMetropolitan Tract and its firstgrand conception, a “City within acity.” (Bottom-center is the southwall and roof of the TuberculosisLeague headquarters. The buildingresembled a small temple withits front classical façade facingFourth Avenue.)77

78 Part TwoKeeping the above elements in mind,we will now return to the Lake Washington ShipCanal project, then outline the origins of the BoguePlan, turn to the Metropolitan Tract’s monumentalchanges, and conclude with the climactic battlebetween the Bogue and Harbor Island plans. Oncethe city committed to a northern route for the shipcanal—which would connect Lake Washington toeither Elliott Bay or Shilshole Bay through LakeUnion and Salmon Bay—it expended no seriouseffort to build the canal until 1906. Not seeingany economic benefits in it, the Army Corps ofEngineers had opposed the construction of thecanal back in November 1905. This rejectionprompted the developer James Moore to considerthe challenge. Moore was responsible for muchdowntown and residential construction. He hadextensive financial commitments; one moreseemed not to matter. He offered to construct awaterway with a wooden lock, sweetening theproposal with a promise to donate the finishedproduct to the federal government after threeyears, on the condition that the government grantthe city a right-of-way.Major Hiram Chittenden, who headed theSeattle office of the Army Corps of Engineers,objected to Moore’s plan and urged postponementof any congressional legislation giving the city therequired right-of-way. The chamber of commerceignored Chittenden’s requests; in fact, it hadalready dispatched the former governor JohnMcGraw to Washington to lobby for enablinglegislation. Unaware of Chittenden’s opposition,Courtesy UW Libraries, Special CollectionsCongress granted theright-of-way on 11June 1906.Now obligated toDeveloper James Moore was widely applaudedfor opening the great Victorian Denny Hotelatop Denny Hill in 1903. Built soon after thecity’s “Great Fire” of 1889, it stood emptyuntil Moore took possession, renamed it theWashington Hotel, and promoted it as “Thescenic hotel of the world.” Here Moore isrespectfully caricatured in Argus as leading histurreted hotel like a pet on a leash.construct the canal, Chittenden sought to undermine confidencein Moore’s plan. He conducted tours for influential citizens toconvince them of the infeasibility of Moore’s plan, offeringAlready known for his scholarly history of the fur trade industry in the AmericanWest, as well as his designs for the road system in Yellowstone Park that is still inuse, Major, Hiram Chittenden arrived in 1906 to take command of the Army Corpsof Engineers Seattle office and ultimately both the building of the Lake WashingtonShip Canal and leadership of the Port of Seattle through its first years.

Courtesy, Lawton GoweyBefore the level of Salmon Bay was raised nine feetbehind the Chittenden Locks when they were completedin 1916 the many structures at the shore—most ofthem Ballard’s lumber mills—were photographed withthis 9-foot rod indicating the level to which the freshwater would reach. Many structures were raised, someprotected behind seawalls, and a few were demolished.City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism Emerges79a plan of his own for consideration.His alternative was to build two locksbetween Salmon Bay and ShilsholeBay. He planned to site the locks eithernear the narrows at Shilshole Bay (thesite he favored) or at the eastern end ofSalmon Bay. Chittenden steadily builtsupport for his plan, but he encounteredopposition from Ballard mill owners,who feared the locks would cause theirproperty to flood. But the chamber ofcommerce, informed by Chittenden thatthese fears were exaggerated, assuredthem that such flooding would not occur.The Lake Washington Canal Associationsuccessfully lobbied the 1907 statelegislature to organize an assessmentdistrict. Moore sensed he was in over hishead and transferred his right-of-way tothe association.Enter the railroad interests.Railway and Marine News reported inits January 1909 issue: “[B]ig shippinginterests . . . almost to a man, are infavor of the Duwamish improvementto Black River.” Black River was LakeWashington’s natural outlet to the south and joined the White River to form the DuwamishRiver. (Since 1915 the White River north ofAuburn has been known as the Green River.)Railroad companies whose lines approachedSeattle from the south were already building inthe vicinity of the Duwamish. The flat land therewas ideal for warehouses and manufacturingplants. If the Duwamish’s meanders could bestraightened and its channel deepened, thenaccess to Elliott Bay would also be facilitated.The railroad companies’ lobby persuaded theOriginally printed in the Post-Intelligencer in the summer of 1906,this Black River scene is described there as “near” the CedarRiver, which then still joined the Black near where Airport Waynow meets Rainier Avenue. Later, in preparation for the ninefootlowering of Lake Washington in 1916, the Cedar River wasturned to flow into Lake Washington rather than into the BlackRiver. With this lowering the Black River, which was the ancientout-flow from the lake, went dry and the Lake Washington ShipCanal became the new outlet for the Twenty-two-mile long lake.

80 Part TwoWashington courts to declare the assessment district law unconstitutional, thereby preventingKing County commissioners from issuing the necessary bond. Then the lobby persuadedthe chamber’s Manufactures Committee to join the railroad companies in opposing thecanal and to support instead the development of the Duwamish area for manufacturing.Divided from within, the chamber ignored its Manufactures Committee andsuccessfully lobbied a bill through the 1911 legislature providing $250,000 for canalconstruction. All that remained was for Congress to act. The chamber also acceptedChittenden’s original 1906 recommendation favoring the Shilshole Bay narrows as thelocation for the locks. To appease the mill owners, Chittenden recommended that they begiven $100,000 to compensate for potential damage, which they gladly accepted. Localdonors contributed $500,000 to purchase rights-of-way from property owners and to payfor excavation as noted above. Construction finally started on 1 September 1911, ninemonths after Chittenden’s retirement and one week before he was elected to the SeattlePort Commission as its first president.As an introduction to the greatest engineering scheme ever proposed for Seattle,the Bogue Plan, we may note that by 1911 three engineers had risen to prominence andpower: Hiram Chittenden, J.D. Ross, and Reginald Thomson. All three were bent uponBoth courtesy, Army Corps of Engineers. Photo by Curtis and MillerIt took six years to build the locks from thegroundbreaking in 1911 to the dedication in1917. The top photograph was taken nearthe end of the first year, in the fall of 1912.It shows the pit dry—or “dewatered”—behindthe cofferdam on the right. Reinforced withpilings, the temporary dirt dam allowedconstruction on the locks while ships passedwith the tides in and out of Ballard’s SalmonBay. Most of the cofferdam was removedin the fall of 1915 after the completed greatgates to the locks were closed. Early in1916 the locks were opened to the tides andboats while a dam was completed to join thelocks to their south or Magnolia side. Nextthe locks were closed in July 1916 for thethirteen days needed to allow Salmon Bayto fill with fresh water to the level of LakeUnion. It took another three months tolower Lake Washington to the level of LakeUnion. Meanwhile, on August 3, 1916, thefirst vessels (both from the Army Corp fleet)were lifted in the big lock. The dedicationof the canal was saved for July 4, 1917. Itslong ceremonial flotilla was watched byHiram Chittenden from his Capitol Hill home.Confined by a stroke to a wheelchair andpartially paralyzed, Chittenden died ninetysevendays later. The bottom photograph ofthe completed locks was photographed fromthe prospect of the Great Northern Railroad’sbascule bridge.

City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism Emerges81A quartet of early 20th centurytowers are included in the top ofthe two joined views printed hereof the Seattle skyline recordedfrom Elliott Bay. The steel skeletonof the Smith Tower rises betweenthe Grand Trunk Pacific Dock,on the left, and Colman Dock, onthe right. The Colman Tower isnearly new, a replacement for theoriginal that was knocked into thebay on 25 April, 1912. When thesteel-hulled Alameda approachedthe dock the steamer’s engineermistakenly heard the captain’scommand “full speed astern” forits opposite. On the far left of thetop view is the nearly new HogeBuilding, for a brief time afterits 1911 construction the talleststructure in Seattle. The fate ofthe Grand Trunk tower can beestimated from the bottom scene.New in 1912, it was destroyed byfire on 30 July, 1914, three weeksand four days after the dedicationof the Smith Tower, far left.Courtesy, Museum of History and Industrymaking Seattle an industrial as well as a commercial metropolis. Hiram Chittenden, as wehave just noted, had skillfully steered the Lake Washington Ship Canal through the shoalsof conflicting economic interests. And it was because of these achievements that votershad elected him a port commissioner. His ambition at this stage was to widen the city’scommercial base by fully realizing the economic potential of its saltwater facilities. To dothis, he would connect the lakes to the harbor.In their concern for “matter-of-fact” values over commercial ones, Chittenden andJ. D. Ross certainly met the standards that Thorstein Veblen outlined in his 1921 book, TheEngineers and the Price System, and even R. H. Thomson came fairly close. The City Lightsuperintendent, J. D. Ross, aimed to bring cheap electric power to the city and region throughpublic ownership. Cheap power, to his mind, would provide the incentive for industry tolocate in Seattle. Rates would remain discouragingly high unless the monopoly of the privatepower companies was broken by competition. Economists commonly considered this anatural monopoly, as did the various state regulatory commissions and, understandably,the companies themselves. Public ownership of utilities drove down electric rates. Rossand other proponents of public power developed the yardstick principle to justify this kindof competition. Ross joined forces with the Washington State Grange in advocating publicpower modeled on a plan developed in Ontario, Canada, from where he had migrated.And whenever public power became a voter issue elsewhere in western Washington, Ross

82 Part Twowould go and stump for it. As a confidant of Franklin D. Roosevelt on these matters, helater became the first administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA).Thomson joined the Washington State chapter of the American Institute ofArchitects (AIA) in promoting a plan to move government buildings northward and tothereby create a civic center. Real estate groups in the south end saw the architects’ plan as athreat to their plan to eliminate a building height restriction so that they could increase theirrent revenue. In 1903, the south-end interests had convinced the county commissioners tobuy land near Third Avenue and James Street for construction of a county courthouse. Andthey wanted the L. C. Smith of typewriter fame to build a skyscraper on adjacent property,once the height restriction had been eliminated. Smith applied for a permit in October 1910on the premise that the civic center would remain where it was. The city council liftedthe restriction, and construction began on the Smith Tower in November 1911. However,voters rejected funding for courthouse construction in September 1911 and, temporarily,the south-end business interests’ version of a civic center. The stage was set for a showdownbetween these groups.In January 1909 the state AIA chapter organized the Municipal Plans League. Withsupport from both the chamber of commerce and The Seattle Commercial Club, the leaguedrafted a charter amendment to establish a Municipal Plans Commission in time to qualifyfor the 1910 election. Voters overwhelmingly approved the measure. Thomson was namedthe commission’s head. Planners assumed one million people would inhabit Seattle andthat 150 square miles of land was appropriate. Thomson’s personal choice to devise a planof this magnitude was Virgil Bogue, an engineer in Thomson’s mold. Both saw the naturaltopography as something to be overcome, not accommodated. The other candidate was noneother than John Olmsted, whose landscape architectural firm always sought to integrate thenatural setting with commercial development, just as it had done when planning the city’sparks, boulevards, and playgrounds. Olmsted did not stand a chance. The code word wasefficiency.Bogue incorporated the architect A. Warren Gould’s 1908 plan for a civic centerwith his own plan for harbor improvements. Bogue planned to locate the civic center inthe regrade area near Fourth Avenue and Blanchard Street. But a clause was added thatrequired that the Bogue Plan “become the plan of the city.” The clause would later damagethe Municipal Plans Commission’s campaign. In the recent September 1911 election, twobond issues were defeated because they conflicted with the plan, even though it had notyet been accepted by the city council. One issue would have raised money for a museumand auditorium on the old Providence Hospital site at Fifth Avenue and Madison Street,and the other would have raised money for a new courthouse favored by the south-endbusiness interests. If the courthouse bond issue had passed, the civic center would haveremained north of Yesler Way and not moved to the regrade, as intended in the Bogue Plan.As the March 1912 election approached, the Municipal League and the local AIA chapterclaimed that these south-end businesses—the “Landlord Trust”—wanted the civic centernear Yesler to keep rents high.But the most devastating criticism was directed at the Bogue Plan. The Civic PlansInvestigating Committee issued a pamphlet questioning the wisdom of topping off the regradewith fourteen to thirty feet of fill dirt sliced off the south end of Queen Anne Hill and the

The Civic Center as planned by Bogue and copied from his report.The center of this great installation of Beaux Arts constructionswould have sat at what became the commonplace intersectionof 4th Avenue and Blanchard Street in the Denny Regradeneighborhood.City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism Emerges83enormous expense, more than $1million, that would be incurred inthe process. More disturbing, themandatory implementation of theBogue Plan also came under fire.The pro-Bogue forces counteredby contending that the plan couldbe implemented on a pay-as-yougobasis, so long as the plan wasadhered to in the long run.The real trouble inpromoting the Bogue Plan wasthat it had been eclipsed by theHarbor Island terminals issueand by the development of thedowntown Metropolitan Tract.The latter had become the city’sretail and office center as a result of John Douglas’s “city within a city” master plan for hisMetropolitan Building Company (MBC). The MBC’s eighteen stockholders, most of whomwere lumbermen, incorporated in 1907 to take over the leasehold for tract developmentfrom the ubiquitous James Moore, who had failed to develop the university’s property.The regents formally accepted the transfer to the MBC in March 1908, though Douglas,characteristically, had already hired two architects—John M. Howells and I. N. Stokes ofNew York—to develop the master plan.Courtesy, Seattle Public Library. Photo by A. Curtis.Douglas failed to entice anydepartment stores to locate in the tract.He also hoped for a hotel but decidednot to pursue one because hotel revenuesfluctuated with the seasons. He choseinstead to assign office buildings priority,because office rentals would providea steady income. Construction begansimultaneously on the White Buildingand the Henry Building, which wereOne of the few survivors of the Denny Hill neighborhoodis seen here twice during its regrade descension. Theboarding house near the southeast corner of LenoraStreet and Fourth Avenue was lowered about seventyfeet, or about forty feet less than the regrade’s deepestcut near Third Avenue and Blanchard Street and theBogue Plan’s proposed Civic Center. “About 1909” isa good date for both views. The slightly earlier worklooks east over Second Avenue. The Denny Regradereached 5th Avenue in 1910 and left a cliff along itseastern border in 1911. The work of humbling whatwas left of Denny Hill east of Fifth Avenue to its moderngrade resumed in 1929 and was completed in 1931.

84 Part Twonamed after the MBC stockholders Chester F. White and Horace C. Henry. Both buildingswere completed in 1909. Douglas next got approval from the regents to build temporaryoffice buildings; they had denied Moore this right when he had applied. To balance hisconfiguration, Douglas decided to erect a medical and dental building, the Cobb Building,at Fourth Avenue and University Street. John Cobb was a lumberman with offices in thetract. Douglas took pride in the elitist clubs that joined his coterie of renters and settled alongFourth Avenue—the Lumberman’s Club, Seattle Athletic Club, Rainier Club, MetropolitanClub, Elks Club, and College Club. And nearby, at Third Avenue and Columbia Street, stoodthe Arctic Club. A novel feature was added to the tract, the classy Metropolitan Theater,which opened amid great fanfare on 30 September 1911; the Metropolitan contracted withthe Klaw and Erlinger theater circuit. In 1915 the Stuart Building—named after E. A. Stuart,founder of the Carnation Milk Company—was added to the complex where the White andHenry buildings stood. This elitist constellation became an established commercial andcultural center just as the proponents of the Bogue Plan were squaring off against theproponents of Harbor Island development, who also opposed relocating the civic center tothe northern edge of downtown.By 1910 many business leadershad become unhappy with the waythe railroad interests hampered portdevelopment. They were beginningto anticipate the prosperity that wasexpected to flow through the PanamaCanal. Commerce had been the mainstayof Seattle’s economy. The city dominatedtrade within the Puget Sound basin andwith Alaska, and it was beginning tochallenge San Francisco’s dominance inthe trade with Asia.When George Cotterill waselected to the state senate in 1907, hesponsored a bill for improving publicshipping facilities that passed by a largemajority. The bill provided for a publiccommission to implement the program,which required the establishment ofimprovement districts. But in responseto pressure from the Great Northern,Governor Mead vetoed the bill. Therailroad interests feared that competitionfrom a public corporation would lowerwharfage rates; consequently, theychallenged the right of the legislatureto establish improvement districts.The state supreme court sustained theirTo illustrate a Metropolitan Building Companyadvertising card, the photographer looked south acrossthe intersection of Fourth Avenue and Union Street to thefirst two-thirds of the ultimately block-long mixed-uselandmark, the White-Henry-Stuart building.

City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism Emergesobjections. However, because of this kind of obstructionism, the railroad companiesalienated their traditional conservative supporters, including the newspapers. Despite itsideological opposition to municipal ownership, the chamber of commerce joined TheSeattle Commercial Club in recommending that alternative in late 1910.Responding to this regrouping of interests, Cotterill, Thomson, and the corporationcounsel together framed a bill for the 1911 legislature to allow counties to establishport districts that would be under the direction of municipal corporations with broadgovernmental powers. The bill passed overwhelmingly in the state house and narrowly inthe state senate and was signed into law on 8 June 1911. Seattle voters established the Portof Seattle and elected three commissioners in September 1911.Part of the Bogue Plan would create a central harbor facility and convert LakeUnion into an industrial lake. The chamber of commerce saw in the Harbor Island terminals“promise [of] an early impetus to the commercial and industrial growth of the port.” Thechamber prophesied that the city could gain coastal supremacy by developing a harbor facility“along the lines of [New York’s] Bush terminals” and by entering “into a lease with someresponsible and competent party to build and operate theentire plant.” Miller Freeman had announced earlier, inthe first issue of his Town Crier, on 3 September 1910:“Cheap industrial acreage is necessary to give stabilityeven to the value of our present tidelands and primarywaterfront property [along with] provision of auxiliarydockage.” In a December 1910 Town Crier article titled“The Bush Terminals—A Lesson for Seattle,” C. C.Closson claimed that New York’s shipping supremacywas due to private development of its waterfront, whichgave it a “public character.” In Seattle many differentbusiness lines were reaching a consensus on how todevelop the harbor.Independently of the advocates for the Bushterminals, the port commissioners in September 1911began preparing a bond issue. If approved, $600,000would go to straightening the Duwamish and $750,000to constructing the canal, and $50,000 would pay forthe Cedar River project and $25,000 for a city dock.With R. H. Thomson now acting as port engineer, thecommissioners planned a $3 million facility, but insteadof submitting the whole package to the voters they limitedtheir first request to $500,000 for one pier only. If theywere successful in this first endeavor, they planned tosubmit the rest of the package in due time. Chittenden,moving systematically and conservatively, wrote tothe Bush Terminal Company and other port operatorsfor information. The Bush Terminal Company’s vicepresident of advertising, R. F. Ayers, replied to Chittenden85As depicted in Cartoons andCaricatures, a 1906 collection ofpolitical sketches by Seattle artists,Scott Calhoun, the city’s new corporatecounsel, tests the relative gravity ofcorporate and municipal law. In MenBehind the Seattle Spirit, a competingbook of political cartoons publishedby Harry Chadwick of the Argus alsoin 1906, Calhoun is described duringhis honeymoon as the city’s attorney.“He is an able lawyer, possesses aneven temperament, and such a genialdisposition that he can beat a man ina lawsuit, and make him like it.”

86 Part Twoin October, informing him that a Charles Fenn wasinterested in getting some eastern capital together fordeveloping Harbor Island. Ayers followed with anotherletter, telling Chittenden that Fenn probably preferredTacoma—a sure way to stir up the competitive spirit onPuget Sound.Scott Calhoun, the Port of Seattle’s legalcounsel, waxed enthusiastic. Wanting to check out therumors, Calhoun enticed Alden Blethen to join himat a meeting with Chittenden on 25 December 1911.Chittenden consented to the meeting, but only on thecondition that Calhoun make no commitment to HarborIsland on the Port’s behalf. Chittenden did not know,however, of the negotiations that Calhoun had alreadyundertaken, together with the dedicated opponents ofmunicipal ownership Thomas Burke; J. D. Lowman, thepresident of the chamber of commerce; and J. S. Gibson,the president and general manager of the InternationalStevedoring Company.After the meeting Calhoun traveled to NewYork, where he consummated an agreement with what hecalled “New York parties” that was endorsed by Burke,Lowman, and Gibson. Known as the “Gentlemen’sAgreement,” it committed the Port to a $5 million bondissue for construction of facilities for private developers.When Calhoun returned to Seattle, he arranged a meetingwith Blethen on 26 January at the chamber of commerce.To overcome the resistance that he anticipated wouldcome from the Port Commission, Blethen coordinatedpublicity with Scott Bone (Brainerd’s replacement aseditor of the P-I), so that the city was greeted on theAmong the three original membersof the Port of Seattle Commission,Robert Bridges was the socialist.Although often at odds with HiramChittenden, the two commissionerswere, at first, inclined to keep theirdifficulties discreet, understandingthat the Port’s future was still veryvulnerable to the attacks that wereregularly made upon it by the localpress and by private shipping andrailroad interests. The commissionersagreed to emphasize the public worksof the Port, its plans for waterfrontfacilities, and its intent to make thePort affordable and competitive withother ports—especially those of SanFrancisco and Portland.morning of 27 January with the headline “GREAT TERMINAL FOR SEATTLE.” Onpage two Calhoun expanded on the front-page coverage by exclaiming how Seattle wouldprosper at the expense of San Francisco. The Times followed in the afternoon with moreof the same: “The project will involve a bond issue. But more than half the amount . . .will immediately be spent to begin construction of a Bush Terminal on Harbor Island. .. . The Bush people have made their proposition. The matter is now in the hands of thenewly created Port Commission.” This statement was an outright falsehood. Ayers wasthe only “New York party” that Calhoun had met with, and Ayers no longer worked forBush. Seattle businessmen had contributed $25,000 to support him while he barnstormedfor the chamber of commerce. At a large meeting at the chamber on 28 January, Calhoundenounced the commission for foot-dragging and resigned as legal counsel to work forAyers.Meanwhile, Chittenden responded to a wellspring of public sentiment for port

City Politics, 1904-1912: Progressivism Emergesimprovements and increased the original amount of the proposed bond to $2 million. Thenhe added two more propositions totaling $5 million. He worded the bond proposition so thatif Ayers and his backers failed to raise their bond, the Port could invalidate the partnershipwith Ayers. Chittenden refused to change the wording, despite pressure from Blethen andAyers. Of the commissioners, only Robert Bridges campaigned directly against the HarborIsland project. The Town Crier charged Bridges with being the “most dangerous factorin opposition to the terminal plans.” By this time attention had shifted almost completelyfrom the Bogue Plan to the Harbor Island issue.Upon receiving a message from Burke, who had accompanied Calhoun to NewYork, that the “terminal must be adopted substantially as agreed upon,” Thomson retortedin a 7 February letter that the state constitution limits leases of harbor lands to thirty yearsand prohibits the lending of credit to a private institution, thereby invalidating the provisionin Calhoun’s agreement for seven years of free rent. He added that the demand that theFuller Construction Company be given the construction contract violated the law requiringcompetitive bidding. He also reminded Burke, who habitually acted as a law unto himself,that the decision of whether a subway should be built to Harbor Island was up to the cityand not within the Port’s jurisdiction. He concluded his letter by reminding the judge that“this proposition has from the beginning, been put up to the Commission as a ‘strong armproposition,’” no doubt leaving Burke gasping at his impudence.The Ayers forces, now gathered under the name Pacific Terminal Company, wereshaken when Irving Bush himself, the owner of the Bush Terminal Company, announcedin the 24 February Town Crier that his company “has no connection with the terminalenterprise of Mr. Ayers[,] that no arrangement has been made for the interchange of trafficwith the proposed Seattle terminals, and that Mr. Ayers was in the company’s employ87On consecutive pages of its 28 January,1912 issue the Post-Intelligencerenthusiastically printed page-widephotographs (printed together here)comparing the “famous Bush terminals”of New York with the Harbor Island site(outlined in white and indicated withan arrow, far left) where a “duplicate”terminal was planned for Seattle at HarborIsland. However, the confident tone ofthis general comparison included itsown ambivalence. The subhead for theNew York (Brooklyn really) panoramareads, “Duplicate of These Will Be Builton Harbor Island . . .” Flip the page ofthe same P-I and the subhead for theSeattle tidelands photograph is not socertain, “Harbor Island, Where Duplicateof Famous Brooklyn Plant May be Built.”The mild retreat of this second claimfrom “Will” to “May” was, of course,prescient and advised for the Seattle BushTerminals soon ran into trouble and werenever built.

88 Part Twoless than two years, in charge of certain lines of advertising.” Unfazed by this revelation,the Times opined that “no one can question the ability of the Pacific Terminal Company”with its array of “respectable business men,” financiers, and other experts. The TownCrier, however, tempered its defense of Ayers by advising him to “clear up the situation,[otherwise] it will be far better to vote against all [harbor] propositions.”As the 5 March 1912 election day approached, the Municipal League plaintivelypleaded for a “Square Deal” for the Bogue Plan. Chittenden, in the 24 February editionof Municipal News (the organ of the Municipal League), argued that the Bogue Planwould save the city money in the long run and that it was only “directive in character”and not “mandatory.” Further, according to the paper, the city should acquire the tract forthe civic center as soon as possible. In the 2 March issue, Chittenden criticized Ayers’splan, beginning with the statement that the Pacific Terminal Company would not actuallyoperate the terminal but would lease out operations. He expressed his dismay that the“company is to have a free hand to exploit the leasehold for its own profit; that it is to payno taxes on the property; [and] that there is no guarantee that the company will expendthe $6 million it says it will.” He added, “Its insistence on a substantial deferral of rentalpayments might even prove illegal.” Chittenden warned that if the company failed—and itprobably would—the Port would have to pick up its obligations because Ayers could notproduce “security.”Hardly any mention of the Bogue Plan can be found in the newspaper coverageas election day neared. Both the Times and P-I featured a sketch of the terminal on theirfront page, along with a two-part illustration depicting future growth if the $5 million bondissue were approved and the inevitable depression if it were not, contributing to the fearthat land values would drop as workers departed for Tacoma. The chamber of commercefurnished copy for the articles. The P-I chose neutrality on the Bogue Plan, while the Starurged voters to vote no. The Union Record endorsed the commission’s bond issues andopposed bond issues for Harbor Island. Its editor suggested voting no on the Bogue Plan,recommending that the plan serve as a set of guidelines in the future. The Town Crierand Argus suppressed references to the Bogue Plan. The Argus displayed oval portraits ofBlethen and Bone, with Harbor Island in the background, and Chadwick contended thatalthough $5 million was a lot of money, it would be wisely spent. Besides, he argued, theproperty would revert to the city in sixty years anyway. Chadwick sarcastically added as apostscript that “the so-called civic center plan is also lost in the shuffle and it fails to elicita mention [in the dailies]. . . . Anyway the Bogue plans will keep.”On 5 March the Bogue Plan lost by more than ten thousand votes. All eight bondissues of the Port, totaling $8.1 million, were overwhelmingly approved. And the citycharter was amended, giving the Port of Seattle power to control waterfront streets.Over the strenuous objections ofBridges, Chittenden signed an agreementwith the Pacific Terminal Company,confident that it would ultimately default.Ayers was unable to raise a surety bond.Chittenden then took steps to invalidatethe contract. Chittenden then preparedTown Crier masthead

a proposition for the 1913 ballot, asking voters to cancel the two Harbor Island bondsthat they had approved in 1912 and to approve instead a new $3 million bond to developfacilities at the East Waterway, at the mouth of the Duwamish, and Smith Cove. Votersapproved the measures, and general acceptance was reflected when even the Railway andMarine News switched its support to the East Waterway, the choice of the commissioners.One issue from the 1912 election was still not resolved: the civic center. Wherewould the courthouse be sited? Upon meeting with the mayor, George Cotterill, the countycommissioners agreed upon a joint County-City Building to be built on the block betweenThird and Fourth avenues and James Street and Yesler Way. Voters approved the agreementby 35,768 to 16,565, and Construction began in June 1914.Defeat of the Bogue Plan marked an end to the “city beautiful movement” in Seattle,though we have noted that the choice of Virgil Bogue over John Olmsted already meant thevictory of those concerned with “efficiency” andutilitarianism over those concerned with civicbeauty. In the aftermath of this bitter controversy,the Port of Seattle revived the city’s commerce.In 1916 the San Francisco Examiner notedSeattle’s rise to first place in shipping on thePacific Coast, a position that the city would nothave achieved had it not been for Chittenden’scool and skillful maneuvering of the Port’s planwhile countering that of Seattle’s business elite.89Dedicated on 4 May, 1916, the new City-County Building suitedthe Central Business District well, for it looked more like anoffice building than a courthouse. This view of it across ThirdAvenue at Jefferson Street dates from the First World War. TheU.S. Food Administration’s sign “Food Will Win the War” standson the lawn since named City Hall Park, in part for the long-timepresence there of the old “Katzenjammer Kastle,” which housedcity government from 1890 to 1909, nearly twenty of its most“booming” years.The completion of the Smith Tower in 1914 put a monumentalcap on the Seattle cityscape, especially when seen from thebay. The newer of the Seattle picture books shown here takesadvantage of this grand prospect and largely on the basis, nodoubt, of the Port of Seattle’s success has named Seattle “TheSeaport of Success.” While still impressed with Seattle as“The Wonder City of the West” the earlier publication, ca. 1912,had no Smith Tower to show off. Instead its cover illustrationdepicts an Asahel Curtis view photographed from First Hilland showing with the Olympic Mountains as a backdrop forthe then relatively new landmark buildings of the MetropolitanTract. The somewhat taller Standard Furniture building andNew Washington Hotel stand on the right.

90 Part ThreePart ThreeThe Economy, Labor, and Politics, 1913–1917During the period covered earlier, from about 1895 to 1912, issues of moralityoften spurred reform groups to action. Each group had its own focus, such as the closedtown–open town controversy, child labor legislation, municipal ownership of utilities, citybeautification, woman suffrage, maximum hours of work, free speech, direct legislation,police corruption, and vice rackets. Reformers could and did coalesce, but their coalitionstypically were short lived. As noted above, the formation of the Municipal League in1910 gave a degree of permanence to the reform groups that they had hitherto lacked.The Washington Federation of Women’s Clubs was already that kind of unifying force forwomen’s groups. Woman suffrage, which brought about the recall of Mayor Gill in 1911,also lent more stability to reform. Unionization revived upon the return of prosperity andled to the creation of the Seattle Central Labor Council, which shared most of the objectivesof the reform groups.Opposition typically came from the downtown business establishment. Manybelieved the establishment’s leaders to be linked to absentee corporations that exactedspecial privileges and franchises from the city council and mayors at the expense of thepublic welfare. Consequently, theCourtesy, Seattle Public Utilitiesreform coalition held togethermore often than not during thisearlier period, working jointlyto defeat the Harbor Islandproposals in 1912. But even thatwas only a partial victory for theMunicipal League, because itfailed to get the rival Bogue Planpassed. The battle between thetwo plans ushered in a new erain Seattle politics. In the new era,morality was less often the issueSeattle City Light’s Lake Union plant was itssecond hydroelectric facility. The 1,500-kwauxiliary hydro unit seen here (top) beinginstalled in 1911 at the southeast cornerof Lake Union, cleverly used for its headthe overflow from the Volunteer Park HighReservoir that was about 300 feet abovethe generator. The better known and morepowerful steam units with their long row ofsoaring stacks were added in 1914, 1918,and 1921. When completed, the tall and widewest wall of steam plant offered a mostlyglass “billboard” upon which to advertisethe public facility (bottom). City Light beganits campaign to promote electricity andelectric appliances in 1912.

The Economy, Labor, and Politics, 1913 - 1917that motivated and united reform groups. Public ownership and labor–employer issuessoon dominated politics. Industrial relations were rife with class conflict, causing civictension that the Great War exacerbated. In this way, Seattle came to resemble cities in theindustrial states of the East and Midwest and the mining states of the Rocky Mountains. InSeattle, class conflict was most evident in the battle between proponents of the open shopand proponents of the closed shop.Once J. D. Ross took charge of City Light, public ownership of utilities became theone issue that unified all of the reform groups. They were divided on the open shop–closedshop issue and civil liberties but not on public ownership. After City Light acquired thefederal go-ahead to develop hydroelectric power on the Skagit River in 1918, the utility wasable to more successfully compete with the Seattle Electric Company and its successors,though the two providers continued to struggle until City Light acquired the Puget SoundPower and Light Company’s city electrical properties when its franchise ended in 1952.During the first decade of the century, theboomtown culture was steadily transformed into onemore befitting the aspiring middle class. From a censusfigure of 80,671 in 1900 the city’s population nearlytripled by 1910 when 237,194 citizens were counted.Neighborhoods became firmly established and infusedwith a sense of community. Those who used to benewcomers were now stable members of the community,seeking lifelong careers and predictable futures for theirfamilies in a cultural setting that was better than thatfrom which they had migrated. Responsible, efficientgovernance became their objective, as reflected by theMunicipal League. In examining this transition fromboomtown to maturing city, we will turn first to theeconomy—the factor that underpinned city life.The year 1912 saw the economy moving out ofa slump. Bank clearances climbed by $50 million thatyear and continued to increase in 1913. The outbreakof war in Europe created demand for war material. Thediscovery of gold in Alaska’s Shushanna district spurred the provisioning trade. Beforethe discovery, shipyards were already busy with both new construction and repair work,preparing for the annual springtime reprovisioning of Alaska. It was rumored that thesalmon catch was about to set a record. And the federal government’s decision to buildthe Alaska Railroad increased investment. Puget Sound Traction, Power and Light’s A.L. Kempster—in his weekly report to the Boston headquarters—wrote that the railroadwas badly needed “to restore active trade between the city and the territory.” Apartmentbuildings filled, triggering a housing shortage. Kempster reported the “flourishing” ofthe lumber and shipping industries, which was due in part to the 100 million board feetof fir needed just for railcar construction. In anticipation of the opening of the PanamaCanal, the Kosmos Line inaugurated its trans-Pacific service. The new Sears, Roebuck andCompany store at First Avenue and Lander Street planned to increase its workforce from91A. L. Kempster in a caricature takenfrom the 1906 publication Men Behindthe Seattle Spirit

92 Part ThreeAfter the Bible, the SearsCatalogue, a.k.a. the “Wish Book,”was the most popular codex inmany American homes. Their own“book of books” made it possiblefor Sears and Roebuck’s to movein 1913 to their recently reclaimedsection of the Seattle tideflats. In1915 Sears added 800,000 squarefeet to their Seattle operationbut still the expanded plant wasused exclusively for its mail orderbusiness and one could not walkinto the place off the sidewalk tobuy a suit or appliance. At lastin 1925 the Seattle Sears storebecame the company’s second“Class-A retail space.” (The firstwas in Chicago, Sears’ home.) Bythen, many people could drive tothe store on First South in theirown cars—and there was plenty ofparking.110 employees to 858. Kempster also reported on the Oregon-Washington Railway andNavigation Company’s withdrawal of its trans-Pacific business in wheat and flour fromPortland and its shifting of four of its direct lines to Seattle and two of its direct lines toTacoma. As of March 1912, flour exports from Seattle exceeded those from New York.Puget Sound ports exported three times as much flour as Columbia River ports. The justcompletedFisher Flour Mill, near Harbor Island, was the coast’s largest flour mill; theAlbers Brothers’ mill was only slightly smaller. The city’s flour mills now numbered five.Courtesy Museum of History and Industry, Webster and Stevens CollectionFisher Flour’s great mill on Harbor Island at the mouth of the Duwamish River Waterway.

The Economy, Labor, and Politics, 1913 - 1917As to the Port of Seattle, at the end of 1913 Chittenden reported that work onthe central waterfront wharves was to be completed in 1914, the world’s longest dock, atSmith Cove, was to be ready in June of that same year, and the Salmon Bay facility wasalready taking in revenue. A 1,500-foot wharf large enough to hold one million cases ofsalmon was under construction in Elliott Bay. Waterborne commerce, steadily increasingbefore 1914, boomed during the Great War. Total imports were worth $89,339,742 in 1914,exports $65,260,205. By 1916 these values had more than doubled to $259,550,106 and$152,879,213, respectively. Expansion continued through 1919, when figures climbed to$455,184,862 and $294,887,045, respectively.93After purchasing the sitein 1912, constructionbegan on the Port ofSeattle’s Salmon Bayfacility in February 1913and by the end of the yearFisherman’s Terminalwas operating. A rainyopening day featured aparade of fishing vesselsthat was first stagedalong the new dockand watched nearbyby rows of admirersprotected beneath theirbumbershoots.The Port of Seattle’s facilities at Smith Cove parallel the older Great Northern Railway docks, on the right. Thisearly aerial also reveals how in the early 1920s the tides still reached deep into Interbay.Courtesy, Port of Seattle

94 Part ThreeEach spring, shipping peaked as Seattle resupplied Alaska’s base population andoutfitted those going there for jobs and the fishing fleet sailing north from Salmon Bay.Shipping peaked again in the fall, when lumber shipments by rail were the heaviest andwhen the late summer wheat harvest was ready to go. By then, canned salmon and fruitcrops were also ready for transport.Domestic imports in 1917 totaled $109,097,093; more than $39 million ofcommodities came from Alaska and almost $44 million from California. Imports fromAlaska in 1917 included almost $20 million ofcanned salmon, most of which was transshippedat the Port of Seattle’s new facility at Smith Cove.Gold dust from Alaska amounted to about $11.8million. Exports to Alaska totaled $32,488,942and steadily grew in tandem with the salmoncanning industry; machinery, hardware, tinplate(to make cans), and household supplies werethe main exports to the territory. Of the importsfrom California in 1917, the chief commoditieswere about $10 million of gasoline, almost $7million of fuel oil, and about $5 million of sugar.Exports to California totaled $16,657,938 andmainly consisted of flour, canned salmon, wheat,and canned milk (from the Carnation MilkCompany’s plant in Kent).Japan, China, and British Columbiawere usually the most important foreign tradingpartners in the years 1915–20. Exports to Asia(measured by tonnage) grew steadily from 18percent of all foreign exports in 1915 to 39 percentin 1916, 66 percent in 1917, and 79 percent in1918; the proportion then dropped slightly to 75percent in 1919. Imports from Asia (measured bytonnage) ranged from about 40 to 50 percent ofall foreign imports during this period. Until the1920s, when the repaired Panama Canal openedmarkets on the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulfof Mexico, in the United Kingdom and Europe,and on the east coast of South America, the tradewith Asia was foremost for Seattle. The profitsfrom raw silk, Asia’s main export, enabled Japanin particular to gain capital for its industrialexpansion. Machinery, heavy hardware, cotton,and wheat were shipped there from Seattle.Marking the significance of this trade, the SuzukiCompany shifted its headquarters from PortlandCourtesy, Port of SeattleIn the decade that separated its 1915 and 1925promotions, respectively top and bottom, thePort of Seattle stayed with its principal strength,the nearness of Puget Sound to the Orient. ThePort also polished its presentation.

The Economy, Labor, and Politics, 1913 - 1917to Seattle in 1917. The company’s eight steamers brought in so much vegetable oil thatSeattle claimed to have the world’s largest vegetable oil storage terminal. Despite thisasset, no vegetable oil products were ever manufactured in Seattle. Only storage tanks andoil tanker freight cars were manufactured locally.After the war, Japan resumed its vegetableoil shipments via the Suez Canal, leaving Seattle with empty storage tanks. Seattle did nottake up the manufacture of silk products either, because the Great Northern controlled silkimports and was interested only in transshipping to existing silk factories in New Jersey.Exports to British Columbia fluctuated wildly at this time. Exports to British Columbia(measured by tonnage) made up fifteen percent of all foreign exports in 1915, thirty-sixpercent in 1916, and fifteen percent in 1917. The proportion dropped to 6 percent in 1918.The trade with British Columbia did not recover until after the postwar depression.War and preparations for war finally brought large-scale manufacturing to Seattle:shipbuilding. The sudden demand for vessels created by the war in Europe masked thefact that the nation’s shipbuilding had been in a fragilecondition, allegedly because of the relatively high wagespaid to U.S. shipyard workers. Shipbuilding stimulatedother manufacturing, directly affecting boilermaking,foundry, and other metalworking operations. Lumberproduction and woodworking increased, in order tosupply decking and superstructures of steel ships andraw materials for wooden ships. Of the 50,000 peopleemployed in manufacturing in 1918, about 35,000worked in shipyards. Skinner and Eddy Shipyards(which bought the Seattle Construction and Dry DockCompany) was by far the largest of nineteen shipbuildingoperations. Skinner and Eddy was under contract withthe U.S. Shipping Board’s Emergency Fleet Corporation.It launched its first ship in November 1917. BetweenJanuary and April 1918, the shipyard launched eightmore vessels, setting a national record. Because thisGeorge Cotterill was born in Oxford,England, the son of a gardener who,when his son was six, transplantedhis family to the United States.Moving to Seattle in the mid-1880s,Cotterill would hold many positionsin public service through his nearlyseventy years of residency in Seattle.His roles included, in order, AssistantCity Engineer under R. H. Thomson,State Senator, Seattle Mayor, andChief Engineer of the state highwaydepartment. In 1922 Cotterill beganthe first of his four terms on theSeattle Port Commission. The 93-year-old public servant died in aSeattle nursing home in 1958.95level of production could not be sustained, the shipyard’soperations distorted the city’s real economy.Seattle lumber mills found their largest marketwithin the region—housing provided an unlimitedmarket. In 1918 the number of building permits issuedfor small houses was the highest it had been since 1909.Housing was always in short supply, and the shortagedrove up rents. Shipyard workers believed that landlordstargeted them to pay higher rents, a grievance that laterfigured in their postwar strike; that strike led to thefateful General Strike of February 1919.The March 1912 election not only decided thefates of the Bogue and Harbor Island plans but alsodetermined who would be the successor to Mayor Dilling.

96 Part ThreeHaving completed the balance of the recalled Mayor Gill’s term, Dilling had decided notto run again. George Cotterill declared his candidacy. A known prohibitionist and singletaxer, he had been instrumental in shepherding two reforms through the legislature in1911: the woman suffrage amendment and the bill that enabled port districts and exemptedmunicipally owned utilities from regulation by the new Public Service Commission.Cotterill’s opponent was none other than Hiram Gill. Gill’s victory margin in the primarywas about 10,000 votes. Hulet Wells, in third place, gathered about 11,000 votes, despiterunning on the Socialist ticket. He swung his voters to Cotterill, as did the MinisterialFederation its constituency, the “moral” middle class. Cotterill won. Colonel Blethen heldthe utmost contempt for the newly elected mayor. Cotterill’s victory, coming on the heelsof the defeat of the Harbor Island scheme and the rise of the Socialist Party to local andnational prominence in the 1912 elections, infuriated the colonel, as did the steady growthof labor unions and the success of City Light and political reforms in general. He lay inwait, ready to attack when opportunity struck.As May Day approached, the Socialist Party obtained a parade permit from thenew mayor. During the parade a U.S. flag was seized and torn. Although Hulet Wells waselsewhere at the time, working for City Light, he was alleged to have participated in theparade and to have called the flag a “dirty rag.” In mid-June the Times ran the headline“Denouncing Flag As Dirty Rag May Cost Wells Citizenship. . . . Chief Examiner ofNaturalization Bureau Takes up Alleged Statements of Socialist Mayoralty Candidate.”(Wells was a native of Skagit County.) M. M. Mattisonwrote the accompanying article. Wells sued for libel, butthe case wound up in the court of Judge John Humphrey,a known confidant of the paper’s owner. The farcical trialthat followed inspired Wells to write a play based on thetranscripts titled The Colonel and His Friends. Handbillsprinted by the Red News Wagon announced the openingof the play at the Moore Theater on 27 July 1913. Thecolonel and Humphries were portrayed as buffoons, as ina Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Offended, Blethen triedto suppress its showing and waged a vitriolic campaignto unseat Cotterill as mayor and to remove the policechief Claude Bannick, who was conducting raids onproperties devoted to vice operations.Long before the scheduled opening of the play,however, a grand jury called to investigate corruptionamong county officials had indicted Alden Blethen andhis son Clarence for libel. The Times headline of 18June 1913 read, “Times Editors Indicted For LibellingSoapbox Orator.” The injured party in this case was theSocialist John Jarvis, who had been falsely accused ofabsconding with fund-raising money and fleeing thecountry. The Blethens had also made an oblique attemptto link Wells to Jarvis. It had clearly backfired.John E. Humphrey before his elevationfrom the stump to the bench.

Four weeks later, on Wednesday, 16 July,Seattle’s annual weeklong Potlatch celebrationbegan in a carnival-like atmosphere. (Inspiredby the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, thebusiness community had created this event topromote Seattle. The city’s current weeklongcelebration, Seafair, is modeled on the Potlatchcelebration.) The navy secretary, JosephusDaniels, who was on a tour of the Pacific Coast,was feted almost hourly during his stay inSeattle. On the second day of the celebration,Daniels addressed a group of businessmen andprofessionals at the exclusive Rainier Club.Mayor Cotterill introduced Daniels. WhileDaniels was addressing the audience, a pacifistnamed Annie Miller was speaking to a largegathering from her soapbox near the corner ofOccidental and Washington. Various accounts ofthe event indicate that three sailors took over herstand and that she was threatened by one of themThe Economy, Labor, and Politics, 1913 - 1917when she tried to take it back. Then someone coming to her defense shouted, “You’d hita woman, would you?” Two more soldiers stepped into the dispute. Fights broke out. Thepolice arrived and arrested the servicemen. The Times reported sensationally that one of themen, a Sergeant Wallace from Fort Flagler, later died from his wounds. This proved to bea fabrication.In contrast to the neutral accounts that were published in the other dailies (includingthe new Seattle Sun), the story in the Times linked the scuffle with Secretary Daniels’s speech97Courtesy, The Rainier ClubAlden Blethen (1845-1915), Seattle Timespublisher. The Colonel, as he liked to becalled, increased Times circulation with a mixof sensational reporting, partisan advocacy,and colored comics. When he purchased thefailing Seattle Daily Times in 1896 the dailyprinting was only about 3,000 copies. It grewto over 70,000 by 1915.Locals and visitors to Seattle’s first summer festival, the Golden Potlatch (1911-1913), were encouraged to “Getthe Bug.” Promoted around a vaguely native theme, the Potlatch included a parade of papier mache totem poles,here passing the 4th Avenue reviewing bleachers in the then freshly regraded part of the Denny Hill neighborhood.Part of Denny School (1884) at the northeast corner of 5th Avenue and Battery Street can be detected between theparading poles.

98 Part ThreeOn Thursday 17 July, 1913,Mayor and dad George F.Cotterill officially pleadedwith the city’s mothers,“the bosses of the dadsto give them a holiday.”The mayor’s proclamationwas coordinated withShoenfield Furniture’sfirst “Dad’s Day” and itscomic part in that year’sPotlatch Parade. Thefloats on the right featureddads dressed in dressesand busy with domesticchores.Courtesy, Michael Maslanby misrepresenting its content. The paper ran the headline “Daniels Denounces Toleranceof Red Flag.” A column head read, “I.W.W. [Industrial Workers of the World] Denouncedby Head of Navy, Attack on Soldiers and Sailors. . . . Scores Executive Who FostersLawless Mob. . . . His Brilliant Castigation of American Mayors Excites UnparalleledDemonstration of Enthusiasm.” In the article, M. M. Mattison claimed that Daniels, upon“reaching his peroration . . . pointed to the American flag” and began his denunciation ofmayors who permitted the display of the Socialist flag with the statement, “This countryhas no place for the believers in the red flag.” Daniels, who by this time had moved on toMount Rainier National Park, wired his denial: “The reference I made to the red flag andthe statement that the red flag meant danger, was the same one as originally made by meat a banquet . . . at Washington City a few days ago. It had no reference whatever to localconditions in Seattle.”Mattison next announced that on the evening of Friday, 18 July, “a large force ofenlisted men in the city on leave would circulate about the IWW headquarters.” Indeed,in its Saturday editionCourtesy, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collectionsthe Times reported thetrashing of the IWW andSocialist headquartersand the demolition ofthe Red News Wagon.It also reported that theransacking, known as theThe Socialist–trashed piano iscenterpiece for a few posersfollowing the Potlatch riots of 1913.The view looks east on Olive Wayfrom near Sixth Avenue

The Economy, Labor, and Politics, 1913 - 1917Potlatch Riot, had been “carefully planned” by soldiers, who were then joined in the assaultby paraders. The P-I reported that the rioters had “planned the attack at a time when thepolice department was busy with street throngs watching the Potlatch celebration.” In theTimes, Mattison gleefully described the event: “The smashing of chairs and tables, therending of yielding timbers, the creaking and groaning of sundered walls, and above therest the crash of glass. . . . [A]ll blended together in one grand Wagnerian cacophony. Andall the while the crowd outside just howled and cheered. It was almost more joy than theycould stand.”The Sun’s Saturday edition gave an account much like the P-I’s but added thatGovernor Lister had accused Blethen of wrapping himself in the U.S. flag—the Timesregularly carried the flag atop its front page. According to the Sun, “Col. Blethen madeseveral dashes into the alley in the rear of the Times building between one and two o’clockand gesticulating wildly, unburdened his opinions . . . [about] the police department to thepolice [who were] stationed there to enforce the mayor’s order. Before that he had beentrying to make a speech to the assembled mob.” The mayor had ordered the closing of allsaloons, prohibited street meetings, and stopped the Times from printing until the end ofPotlatch.That Mayor Cotterill was disturbed by the riot that his archenemy had promotedis not at all surprising. Blethen immediately asked his friend Judge Humphries to enjointhe mayor and Chief Bannick from enforcing these edicts. The judge obliged, contendingthat the two men were conspiring to injure the Times. Humphries also issued a blanketinjunction to open the saloons on appeal from six saloonkeepers. When Cotterill andBannick requested modification of the injunction, the judge instead prepared bench warrantsto serve on them.Following the judge’s reversal of the mayor’s order, late on Saturday, 19 July, theTimes ran the headline “Cotterill Attempts to Suppress Times. . . . Tries to Shift BlameFor Last Night’s Riots.. . Mayor and PoliceChief Arrested.” Beneaththe headline a half-pagephotograph depicted thedestruction of SocialistParty headquarters. Thecaption read, “Mob AtWork On Red SocialistQuarters. Anarchy inSeattle Stamped OutWhen Soldiers and SailorsGet Busy.” The articledeclared that the riot hadbeen “carefully planned”and blamed Cotterill forthe “anarchy.” On page Another 1913 Potlatch Riot target, the IWW headquarters above the SquareDeal Shop at 211 Occidental Avenue South.99

100 Part ThreeThe Seattle Times sensational front page for Saturday, 19 July, 1913.three the paper proclaimed, “Union Man [Abe Ransom] Plants Stars and Stripes Over Hallof Reds. . . . Says Won’t Works [IWW members] Are Working Man’s Enemy.” The Sundayedition quoted Judge Humphrey: “I want to tell everybody that American born people arenot going to permit a lot of irresponsible foreign born men and women to come and ruinthis country.” (Cotterill had emigrated from England. Other Blethen targets were R. H.Thomson and City Light’s J. D. Ross, both from Canada.)A threatened second riot did not take place, but during the following week boththe Sun and P-I reported that the soldier whom the Times called “Sergeant Wallace” wasreally named Boehmke and was not dead. The editor of the Sun, E. H. Wells (formerlywith the Star and no relation to Hulet), accused Blethen of running the false report tostart a second riot, but by then military authorities were cooperating with Seattle police inquieting matters.

Industrial Relations101Meanwhile, Judge Humphries threatened to disbar Hulet Wells because of his play(the state bar association did disbar him in 1917) and installed a committee of four lawyers,including one of Blethen’s attorneys, Frank Hammond. One member, Alfred Lundin,resigned in disgust because Humphries had issued an injunction on 23 July forbiddingproduction of the play; his lead was followed by the others on the committee. On 26 Julythe judge issued a blanket injunction suppressing “street speaking.” Then Blethen futilelytried to initiate a recall campaign to remove Cotterill from office. The manager of theMoore Theater canceled the play, fearing that the theater would be trashed. The play wasrejected in Tacoma for the same reasons.Industrial RelationsBy the beginning of the twentieth century, labor unions in the Pacific Northwestwere finally challenging the industrial employers’ unilateral control over wages and workingconditions. In their struggle against this authoritarianism, they sought the right to representwage earners within an employer’s jurisdiction and to bargain for their wage scales, hours,and working conditions. To carry out this mission, union leaders and organizations soughtprotection of their freedoms of speech and association under the Constitution. If they wonsuch protection, they could even set up closed shops within the area’s industrial plants.Under closed shop conditions, an employer recognizes a union as the collective bargainingagent for its workers. A closed shop gave union members a degree of job security, becausea seniority system was normally part of a collective bargaining agreement. In addition,it usually meant that all wageworkers engaged in a special craft in a plant had to belongto a union created especially for that craft. If the factory was organized as an industrialunion, however, all wage earners in the plant had to belong to the same union, regardlessof craft. The latter was a rare type of organization at this time; the United Mine Workerswas one such organization. Notuntil the advent of the Congressof Industrial Organizations (CIO)in the late 1930s did industrialunions take shape, particularly inthe mass production industries,among the unorganized andunskilled workers.One does not have tohave a Marxian perspective tosee the conflict between the openshoppers and trade unionistsas one between socioeconomicThe Post-Intelligencer’s front page for 11 December, 1917 goeswith the national victory for the “open shop” for its headline whileputting the sensational local story of the moment, the city council’s“Case Against Mayor” Hiram C. Gill, below it.classes. However, it was theemploying class that declaredwar, not the working class. Thelatter mainly wanted entry to the

102 Part Threemiddle class and found that employers were usually obstructing their upward mobility.Employers chose to believe that the working class was fighting for social revolution, notmodification of industrial relations and a broadening of civil liberties that would help all ofsociety. If unions gained legitimacy, they would dilute the power that the employing classeshad been accustomed to exercising with little restraint; indeed, the courts consistently ruledagainst unions. Local courts readily issued injunctions against strikers and often ruled thatstrikes illegally restrained interstate commerce when that was a factor.Nationally, the National Association of Manufacturers led the open shopforces—those wanting employees to bargain individually with their employers. RobertWiebe notes in his book Businessmen and Reform, A Study of the Progressive Movement,that chambers of commerce in the East and Midwest tried to stay away from such outrightadvocacy. As discussed above, the Seattle Chamber also steered a neutral course initially.But in 1910 the organization passed a resolution in favor of the open shop. However, thechamber offered only passive support until 1914. Subsequently, the chamber lent its supportto the Employers’ Association of Washington (EA), which became the Associated Industriesof Seattle after the General Strike of 1919. The dynamics of this struggle between the openshoppers and the closed shoppers are well illuminated in the case of Stone and Webster’sPuget Sound Traction, Power and Light Company. The company had been formed throughCourtesy, Mike FairleyPatterned after the Niagara Falls hydroelectric facility, the Snoqualmie Falls Project was the state’s firsthydroelectric plant (1898) and the most spectacular of Stone and Webster’s early Puget Sound acquisitionsfor its power and traction monopolies. (It was—and still is—also 100 feet higher than Niagara.) The electricitygenerated at Snoqualmie Falls and other Puget Sound Power & Light Company sites powered the company’sSeattle trolleys including its unique Queen Anne Counterbalance, printed here above the postcard montageof the Snoqualmie facilities.

Industrial Relations 103the merger of the Seattle Electric Company, the Seattle-Tacoma Power Company, and thePacific Coast Power Company. Alton W. Leonard was promoted from Stone and Webster’sMinneapolis firm to manage the operation.In 1911, the company’s streetcar system accounted for seventy-four percent of itsrevenue, and its power and light business in the city returned another twenty-two percent.Its coal mines at Renton accounted for almost all the rest of its revenue and supplied fuelto its Georgetown and Renton steam plants. It also brought in a modest income haulingproduce and coal early in the morning to points along its routes.The company was one of the largest urban employers in the state. With itspaternalistic policies, it was ahead of most large-scale employers: the Stone and WebsterClub arranged social gatherings, the Electric Club sponsored lectures on relevant technicalsubjects, and the company’s annual picnics attracted as many as two thousand employeesand their families. Its Beneficial Association for employees rounded out the picture of ahappy corporate family. However, all this beneficence existed in an open shop environmentprotected by an internal security force that had as one of its main functions the obstructionof any union activity. The company aimed for absolute control of the workplace. Employeessacrificed their freedoms of speech and association for job security. Those who wereconsidered loyal often rose in the ranks because of the company’s policy of promotionfrom within.In 1904, Seattle Electric Company locked out its miners when they rejected a wageoffer. By refusing mediation and hiring and housing strikebreakers, the company broke theunion and maintained the open shop. (As we will see below, the company’s trainmen wereanother matter.) The company’s Secret Service Department planted men to work amongthe employees to detect any union activity. The department also hired special agents tojoin the unions, infiltrate the leadership, promote disruption, and report regularly to thecompany. At one stage, eleven such agents belonged to the International Brotherhood ofElectrical Workers (IBEW) Local 77, prompting A. L. Kempster to boast, “[We] have thehelp of such floating notorious characters . . . as ‘Red Handling, Hot Wire Daly, Walk-outJones, and Monte Ladd’. The chief occupations of these men have been starting strikes,walk-outs, and trouble of all kinds pertaining to labor’s activities.”Since its formation in 1912, Puget Sound Power & Light Company activelysupported the Employers’ Association of Washington to effect statewide collaborationamong employers. The EA issued a general letter on 31 March 1913 to “various businessmen” in the city warning that the closed shop had driven off eighty percent of San Francisco’smanufacturers and that it would “paralyze the industries of Seattle.” After this alert, theEA issued a nine-page letter on 6 May that urged employers to gain absolute authorityin the workplace. In the letter, the association asked whether it was “feasible to effectan organization of the utility companies on the Coast for mutual protection against theaggressions of labor unions.” Utilities did indeed form the Pacific Coast Utilities Associationin 1913 to extend the open shop to utilities coastwide. The letter also referred to a split inthe IBEW between the Reid and McNulty factions; the latter was dominant on the WestCoast. The EA hoped to exploit this division and found the American Federation of Laborreceptive because it favored the Reid forces. The AFL threatened to withdraw the CentralLabor Council’s charter unless the council withdrew the IBEW’s local charter. The IBEW

104 Part Threeran afoul of this factionalism when it staged its 1913strike. The head of the traction division of PSTP&L,A. L. Kempster, boasted to the Boston office that theinfighting “occupied their time to the exclusion of plansand efforts to injure us.” Kempster also reported on 6May that Spokane’s Washington Water Power Companyand the Portland Railway, Light, and Power Companyhad agreed to maintain the open shop for electricalworkers. The British Columbia Electric RailwayCompany soon joined this group. Then the Byllesbyinterests in Tacoma were brought in, and Pacific Gas andElectric in California, fearing a strike, seemed ready tocollaborate.Factionalism within the IBEW continued into1914. A. W. Kerrigan, who headed the Pacific CoastUtilities Association, claimed in June of that year: “Infact, we have already two factions in B.C. and Seattle,fighting each other tooth and nail. We have gone so far asto have the Reid-McNulty crowd in this city take up thequestion . . . to put the McNultyites out of power.” A. W.Leonard nonetheless became dissatisfied with Kerrigan, soPSTP&L withdrew from the association in October 1914and gave its full support to the EA.On 14 June 1913, a few weeks before the PotlatchWilliam J. Grambs, superintendentfor the Seattle Electric Companyand Secretary of the Employers’Association.Riot, the Teamsters Union had held a strike at the Globe Transfer Company. The strikepassed through several stages and spread across the city, not ending until May 1914. Theunion generally succeeded in coercing strikebreakers to return to the barns with theirteams. When one strikebreaker, Ben Angel, emptied his revolver into a crowd that hadsurrounded his wagon, the EA appealed for more police protection. Mayor Cotterill’sapparent indifference to the growing tensions prompted PSTP&L’s W. J. Grambs, also thesecretary of the EA, to schedule a meeting with the mayor and about twenty team ownersfor 22 December. When Grambs accused Cotterill and the city council of siding with theunion, the mayor had the police escort Grambs out of the meeting. The EA then tookover negotiations from the Team Owners Association and threatened retaliation against anyteam owner who signed with the Teamsters. Of those team owners who had already signedwith the union, all but two were coerced by the EA into breaking their contracts.Four thousand people assembled at Dreamland Pavilion on 16 January 1914 toprotest the EA’s open shop drive. The compliant Judge Humphries issued an injunctionagainst picketing. Arrests of Teamsters followed—thirty-five were arrested by March.Teamster members had been responsible for some of the violence that led to the arrests,causing considerable public uneasiness. According to a special agent who had been plantedin the Seattle Central Labor Council, the council was aware of Teamster involvement in theviolence. He reported that the business agent of IBEW Local 77 had warned that Teamstertactics were becoming counterproductive. If the union did not change its tactics and win

Industrial Relations105the confidence of the city’s businessmen, he predicted that it was “the beginning of the endof all your municipal plans . . . your street railway and your city light plant.” The strikedragged on.The new mayor, the resilient Hiram Gill (who ran on a closed town platform onceCotterill chose to run for the U.S. Senate), finally appointed a conciliation committee on 28March 1914. On 25 April the committee recommended that the Teamsters return to workon the owners’ terms but that the owners not discriminate against the strikers. Because ofthe public’s prolonged inconvenience and weariness, the SCLC urged the Teamsters tocapitulate. Nevertheless, the EA’s victory proved to be superficial. Most owners proceededto ignore the association and subsequently signed up with the Teamsters anyway. Allarrested strikers were acquitted.During the strike the Bon Marché was put on the SCLC’s “unfair list” and wasboycotted when it declared in favor of the open shop. Its clerks held two strikes againstthe department store; the second strike lasted from late January to May 1914, when theBon recognized the Retail Clerks Union as the clerks’ bargaining agent. A strike againstthe Pacific Coast Steel Company also began in January, but it was unsuccessful and endedin February. Faced with this broad-based labor militancy and the disruptive Potlatch Riot,the chamber of commerce finally declared its adherence to the open shop principle at its2 February 1914 meeting. In his weekly newsletter toBoston, A. L. Kempster euphorically exclaimed, “Theemployers of the Puget Sound district are more closelyassociated than ever before and are a unit in advancingthe policy of the open shop.”Meanwhile, the SCLC’s Card and Label Leagueformed a state federation to more effectively run initiativeand referendum campaigns, to better coordinate boycottslike that against the Bon, to organize public meetings, andto lobby legislators. The league was composed mainly ofwomen, who were given auxiliary status if they were notmembers. Coming off its success at the January 1914meeting at Dreamland Pavilion, the league organizeda parade of between 7,000 and 10,000 participants onThese two photographs show Seattle politician Hi Gillin situations that demonstrate that politics makes forstrange reunions. In the scene tabove, a smiling Gillshakes the hand of George Cotterill who three yearsearlier supported and took advantage of Gill’s recallby getting himself elected mayor in the next regularelection. Below is Gill’s old moralist gadfly, the halfsmilingPresbyterian cleric Mark Matthews, sharingan apparently cordial moment with the returned andatoned Mayor Gill. They pose at the Smith Towerobservatory soon after “the fourth highest building inthe United States” opened in 1914. The couple withthe flowers between them is unidentified.

106 Part Three30 May to protest the mid-April massacre of miners, women, and children in Ludlow,Colorado, by the state militia and similar militia action in Calumet, Michigan.In August 1914 Congress created the Industrial Relations Commission toinvestigate the great amount of turbulence in industrial relations across the country. TheTown Crier called the commission a “campaign against employers,” claiming that it was“dominated absolutely by the most radical of the labor element of organized labor.” Thecommission came to Seattle on its tour of the country. Mayor Gill, who had never been afriend of unions, nevertheless testified that it was the employers who were more likely tostart trouble than the unions.Some members of the judiciary showed signs of resisting rubber-stamping everyinjunction request made by employers. In September 1915, Judge Kenneth Macintoshrejected a request for an injunction from the EA because it could cite no damages. Hethen rejected an injunction request from the Victor Theater. Judge James T. Ronald alsoestablished a reputation for evenhandedness. Encouraged by this trend among the judiciary,the Teamsters even recommended Judge Robert B. Albertson as a prospective mediatorduring its strike.The Industrial Relations Commission found unemployment to be a critical nationalproblem. Unemployment peaked in Seattle between 1913 and 1915. Washington State’scities had become havens for workers in the agricultural, logging, construction, fishing, andThe Sisters of Providence Hospital was built in stages. The first part, at the southeast corner of Spring Street andFifth Avenue, was completed on Ground Hog Day, 2 February, 1883. That first wing is at the center of this rearview of the hospital that looks west across the intersection of Sixth and Spring. Both streets are being loweredduring another of the city’s many street regrades. Especially through the first ten years of the twentieth centuryupheavals like this one were commonplace in the central business district, and the most likely date for this sceneis the spring of 1909. Two years later the Sisters of Providence moved on to their new hospital on Renton Hill atEighteenth Avenue and Jefferson Street, leaving the sprawling facility empty for experiments like Mayor Cotterill’sLiberty Hotel for the homeless.

City Politics, 1904 - 1916 107canning industries. About two-thirds of these workers were affected by seasonal layoffs.Between November and March each year, the major cities and larger towns witnessedmarked increases in their out-of-work population. To help those seeking employment andto protect the unemployed from exploitation by private employment agencies, Seattleestablished a public agency, to which the Municipal League proudly contributed itssupport.To house and feed the unemployed, in 1913 Mayor Cotterill converted ProvidenceHospital, which was no longer in use, into the Liberty Hotel. Women were not allowed,however, and had to shift for themselves. Hotel residents were issued meal tickets forworking in and around the building and on land-clearing projects. Between 18 November1914 and 18 February 1915, they worked 5,238 hours, earning enough to pay back the$5,200 lent to the hotel by the city and the county. The chamber of commerce’s Charitiesand Endowment Bureau announced reassuringly and without empathy that the unemployedhave an association for land clearing at “reasonable prices” and that “the men who donot seek work will be compelled to move on, in accordance with plans already agreedupon by city and county authorities.” This measure amounted to an antivagrancy law. Thissocial predicament would be encountered in the early 1930s on such an unprecedentedscale and for such a prolonged period that no private or governmental agencies would beable to usefully respond. In both periods production for war provided relief, though not asolution.We have noted the tensions in industrial relations that started the year 1914. As theearly months unfolded, other developments indicated the changing character of the city.The University of Washington president Thomas Kane was unceremoniously dismissed inJanuary. The Seattle Federation of Women’s Clubs almost completely changed direction.Helen Ross trumpeted the “Passing of the Shrieking Sisterhood” in the May issue of theTown Crier and applauded the election of Beatrice Lung to the federation’s presidency.Lung vowed to keep the federation out of politics, unlike her predecessors, who had beenactive in getting legislation passed that favored women, children, and public schools andwho had even lobbied in 1904 for the creation of the Elk National Park on the OlympicPeninsula. Lung claimed that much “discredit” had been brought to the club by theseactivities. She promised, “[W]e will go back to self-culture to a great extent—that sort ofthing which our club women have largely despised during the last few years . . . in favor ofaltruistic work. . . . The Federation will do much toward raising the general cultural levelin the community.” In keeping with the Town Crier’s editorial policies, Ross wrote articlesobjecting to the minimum wage bill and to the arbitration of the Teamsters strike. Shesternly objected to unions on principle and opposed municipal ownership in any form.Later in May, Anna Louise Strong brought to the city the Child’s Welfare Exhibit,which she had organized for the U.S. Education Office. Despite minimal newspapercoverage, the exhibit drew on average 6,000 persons daily and 40,000 on its last day.The exhibit was an outgrowth of the child welfare movement, which had generated muchchild labor legislation and had focused on hygiene, recreation, education, and other factorsbearing on child development.

108 Part ThreeCity Politics, 1914–1916When Mayor George Cotterill decided not torun for reelection in 1914, the irresistibly popular andcolorful Hiram Gill could not resist the chance to bemayor once more. His opponent, James D. Trenholm,had barely defeated the Socialist school board memberRichard Winsor by about 300 votes in the primaries.Gill, with his victory margin of more than 12,000votes, seemed a shoo-in, particularly after his opponentreceived endorsements from the Employers’ Associationand the chamber of commerce, thereby assuring Gill thelabor vote. He cemented his victory by running on aclosed town platform this time. Gill won by more thanCourtesy, Rainier Club 14,000 votes.One of his opponents in the primary had beenAustin Griffiths, who accused Gill of profiting fromAustin Griffithsdefending white slavers, pimps, prostitutes, gamblers,and saloonkeepers. Playfully accepting the challenge,Gill named Griffiths police chief in March 1914. Although Griffiths resigned in Novemberto run for Congress as a Progressive, he accomplished a great deal in a short time. He forbadeofficers on duty from entering places of business except on police errands; he saw to it thatmany of the city’s dark alleys were lighted; he had police maps made to better allocateresources; and he radically improved conditions at the detention center near Jefferson Parkby providing inmates with educational and lecture programs and by allowing the inmatesto grow truck gardens to feed fellow prisoners and to supply city departments. In addition,he fully segregated women’s quarters at the center from the men’s. When Griffiths ran fora council seat in the 1930s, he pointed with pride to this period in his career and won thecouncil seat.Among the issues facing Seattle residents in 1914 was a new city charter.Freeholders had been elected to frame a new charter for submission to voters in July. The

110 Part Threemid-1920s, he would repeat this performance in amuch more complicated setting.The prohibition movement had also beengathering steam. Reacting to the bitter fights thathad erupted statewide in 1909 over a local optionreferendum, the 1911 legislature rejected a similarbill that had been presented by the anti-saloonlegislators. Voter sentiment had already been testedin 1912 in Everett, a wet town, and Bellingham,a dry one. Twenty-eight counties prohibitedliquor sales outside cities and towns. Six countieswere completely dry. Between 1909 and 1912,prohibitionists had won 140 out of 220 local optionelections. Seattle voters were yet to be heard from.A historian of the movement, NormanWhen completed in 1914, City Light’smasonry dam on the Cedar River did notneed all of its 215 feet because the reservoirbehind it leaked. The smaller view showsthe reservoir behind the dam in a rarecircumstance. It is close to full. In thepanorama, however, the reservoir is nearlydrained, a condition that made it practicallyuseless for power generation. The effortto seal the percolating pool took yearsand ultimately its imperfections were onlyforgiven and forgotten when the SkagitRiver project first started delivering powerfrom the Gorge Dam—the first of three onthe river—in 1924. In the meantime, CityLight managed with its imperfect CedarRiver supply and the periodic expansion ofits Lake Union Steam Plant.Clark, explains that the prohibition battle in Seattle was the “most anguished conflict betweenthe evangelical churches and the business community in the city’s history.” Thomas Burkeargued that prohibition would put 8,300 men out of work. Brewers urged moderation,not prohibition. Trade union locals were split: some in the provisioning trades formed theAnti-Prohibition Labor League, while those led by James Duncan, a prohibitionist andthe secretary of the Central Labor Council, established the Prohibition Labor League. Thelatter group convinced the Washington State Federation of Labor’s board of directors tojoin the prohibitionists. The federation had been working together with the WashingtonState Grange in the Joint Legislative Committee, and the federation’s board was easilypersuaded to join grange leaders in pressing for prohibition.The election on 3 November 1914 brought out the largest vote in the state’s history.Initiative 3 was an antisaloon measure, intended to prohibit the “manufacture and sale” of

City Politics, 1904 - 1916liquor. Initiative 3 won by 189,840 votes to 171,208; 94.6 percent of the state’s registeredvoters participated, a record that has never been surpassed. As Norman Clark concludes,“[T]he middle classes in the country and of the city had united in a great effort to controltheir environment, and the lower classes, who lived mainly in the cities, opposed them.”The law would take effect on 1 January 1916.Under R. H. Thomson’s direction, construction of a masonry dam on the CedarRiver was moving ahead, despite warnings of a seepage problem that the UW geologistsMilnor Roberts and Henry Landes had recently identified. Thomson, nevertheless, believedthat clay puddling would staunch the flow. Councilman Erickson supported Thomson, asdid Thomson’s successor, the city engineer A. H. Dimock.City Light needed other hydropower sites if it was to meet the demand forelectricity that J. D. Ross was trying to stimulate. Ross’s long-term strategy was to buildahead of demand, in contrast with Puget Sound Traction, Power and Light, whose strategywas to wait for demand to develop, then build. The company’s long-term strategy was totie up as many potential hydropower sites as possible to prevent City Light from acquiringthem. Two sites attracted Ross: the Hebb property on the White River and the Cushmansite on the Skokomish River in the southeastern Olympic Mountains. Voters in the March1912 election had already approved a bond issue to acquire the Hebb site. The site on theSkokomish had also won approval but by a narrower margin. Ross preferred the latter siteand proceeded to campaign for condemnation funds. Ross also wanted to back up CityLight’s hydropower supply and drafted a bond issue to build, as already noted above, asteam plant at the south end of Lake Union, downhill from the reservoir at Volunteer Park.111Seattle bar scene -- probably south of Yesler Way and so “below the line”.

112 Part ThreeVoters in March 1914 approved this bond issue. Plant construction proved timelier thananyone anticipated.To prevent City Light from acquiring condemnation funds for the Cushman site,PSTP&L allied with two newspapers opposed to public ownership, the Times and TownCrier. They argued that the city needed no more electric power, that the company wasalready in the process of acquiring more sites for the future, that transmission all the wayfrom Cushman was impossible, and that City Light was operating at a loss. To settle thiscontroversy, the Municipal League appointed an investigating committee, which was chargedwith coming up with a recommendation for the league. The committee recommendedthat the league oppose funding, but at its general meeting the league membership votedoverwhelmingly in favor of the Cushman bonds. The Seattle Commercial Club, composedmainly of small businessmen, joined the league in support of the bonds.Fortunately, the Lake Union steam plant became operational in September 1914.When the masonry dam on the Cedar River was completed on 1 November, the dam heldwater but, as predicted, not for long. By mid-December the reservoir had run dry. Thomson’sclay puddling was then begun, only to become central to the running contest between Rossand Erickson. To get Councilman Erickson’s support later for the Skagit project, Ross hadto continue with the endless clay-puddling project. The Times and Town Crier continuedtheir unabated attack on Ross, hoping that Gill, who had opposed municipal ownershipin the past, would refuseto reappoint Rosssuperintendent. To theirdismay Gill reappointedRoss. Following itspolicy of filing on allpossible hydropowersites, PSTP&L inJanuary 1915 purchasedrights to three thousandacres on the Skagit andBaker rivers. Stone andWebster announced thatno construction wouldbe started until there wassufficient demand.A Post-Intelligencer artist hasturned the Pacific Coast upsidedown and twisted WashingtonState to open wide for the fleetand prosperity expected to visitSeattle’s Harbor Island terminalswith the completion of the PanamaCanal. The full-page illustrationwas printed in the P-I’s 10 March,1912 Sunday edition.

City Politics, 1904 - 1916At last the Panama Canal opened on 15 August 1914. The railroad companiesimmediately began losing traffic. In January 1915, Railway and Marine News reported,“The regular steamship lines have taken from rail carriers almost the entire eastboundmovement of canned goods, dried fruit, wine, etc., and the railroads principal losses havebeen pipe, wire, steel, metals, drugs, chemicals, dry goods, pianos, and general merchandise.. . . The heaviest loss to the railroads westbound has been sustained in dry goods and cottongoods moving from New England, New York city [sic], State mills, Pennsylvania, and theSouth. All Pacific jobbers and many large department stores are shipping by the canal, andstrongly endorse the service.”The port’s trade in 1915 proved to be the best on record. For the first time, thedollar value of trade in the Washington Customs District (all ports in the state) exceededthat in the San Francisco Bay District. The editors at the Railway and Marine News,however, started an attack on the Port Commission: it was operating at a loss, takingbusiness from the private docks, driving down wharfage fees, constructing unnecessaryfacilities—accusations similar to those made against City Light. Under this barrage the PortCommission failed to get voter approval for a belt-line railroad that would have directlyconnected rails to docks. The commissioners then appealed to the Washington State PublicService Commission to intervene and were turned down. Frustrated, the Port Commissionnext appealed to the Interstate Commerce Commission to force railroad cooperation inimproving switching facilities on the central waterfront and in establishing a common userline between Smith Cove and Salmon Bay. Before the Interstate Commerce Commissioncould act, the railroads agreed to establish the common user line.To circumvent the Port Commission, the 1915 state legislature tried to transfer thecommission’s authority to set wharfage and dock rates to the Public Service Commission113One of the Port ofSeattle’s many initiativesin 1915 is parodied in this23 February cartoon fromthe Post-Intelligencer.It suggests that thelegislature’s rejection ofa Port request to increaseits power to tax was alsoa final rejection of thePort itself. In fact, it wasin 1915 when the Port ofSeattle first became theone that was more likelyto be doing the booting ofits detractors.

114 Part Threebut failed in the senate by one vote. If the authority had been transferred, a precedent wouldhave been set for allowing the Public Service Commission to also determine the electricrates for municipally owned electric utilities. J. D. Ross repeatedly prevented this fromhappening in the years ahead. Another bill was overwhelmingly passed to dilute the portcommissioners’ power by enlarging their number to five. This bill would be subjected toa referendum vote in the 1916 general election, along with a host of other bills that wouldhave a similar effect on home rule.Two events in late 1915 proved fateful to the city’s waterborne commerce. Landslidesclosed the Panama Canal in November. And U.S. railroads had to divest themselves of theirinterests in steamship lines by 4 November, as required by the Panama Canal Act. The GreatNorthern sold its SS Minnesota to an Atlantic shipper. (The SS Dakota had run aground inJapanese waters and was wrecked and irretrievable.) The Pacific Mail Line (owned bythe Southern Pacific) also sold its ships. In addition, the Seamen’s Act of 1915 mandatedEnglish-language literacy among a high percentage of the crews on ships flying the U.S.flag. Many steamship companieschose foreign registry to escapethe act’s requirements. Thereafterfew ships of U.S. registry werefound sailing the Pacific.The lumberman EdwinG. Ames, the head of Popeand Talbot’s operations in thePuget Sound basin, praised thelegislature in March 1915: “[F]orthe first time in years we havea decent legislature, made uplargely of businessmen . . . [who]are looking at things not from asentimental point of view, but froma purely dollars and cents pointof view.” Strikes and lockoutsin lumbering and logging hadbeen in progress in Everett andCentralia, as well as Grays Harborand other Olympic Peninsulatowns. In Seattle, tensions hadbeen growing daily. Home rulershad been diluting traditionalbusiness control of local and statepolitics and government. Againstthis backdrop the legislature hadgathered in Olympia in January1915.Courtesy, Seattle Municipal ArchiveUsing money secured earlier through a 1911 bond issue, the cityconstructed its first municipal railway, a four-mile line from thebusiness district to the south end of the old Ballard Bridge by wayof Dexter Avenue and Nickerson Street. The line’s car barn (top)and power plant (bottom) were constructed in 1914, respectively,on Third Avenue West a half block north of Nickerson and onAloha Street just east of Dexter. The barn’s service pit survivesas a sunken student lounge in Seattle Pacific University’s MillerScience Learning Center.

City Politics, 1904 - 1916The legislature, which was composed mostly of businessmen, laid out the followingobjectives: to defeat or undermine municipal ownership of utilities and ports, to renderthe labor movement ineffective, and to destroy the direct legislation process. When thesession was over, the legislature’s mission seemed largely accomplished. The Democraticgovernor, Ernest Lister, hardly impeded the legislative process that steamrolled by. Muchof the legislation affected Seattle and seemed to target City Light and the Port of Seattle.A lumberman and state senator from King County, Howard Taylor, promoted a bill thatwould have prevented a new utility from competing with an existing one unless there was a“public necessity.” If successful, it would have delegated to the Public Service Commissionthe power to decide on such a matter; rejection of any takeover by a municipal utility wasguaranteed because of the heavy influence of privately owned utilities on the commission.This was precisely why the National Electric Light Association proposed state instead oflocal regulation—to oppose home rule.A state representative from King County, Frank Renick, won passage of a budgetbill that prevented cities from transferring one agency’s surplus funds to another agencywhose funds were insufficient. If this law had been in effect earlier, it would have blockedconstruction of the City’s first street railway in 1914; the railway’s construction was madepossible by using the garbage department’s surplus funds. After the bill’s passage, the citycomptroller refused to sign warrants to pay the railway’s employees because of the waythat the railway had been funded. But the bill just might be invalidated by a referendumvote in 1916. Time would tell.PSTP&L’s Kempster had been disturbed by the company’s loss of revenues tojitneys—sixteen percent by his estimate. To help out the company, Colonel Blethen lobbiedthrough a bill that required bonding of the unlicensed jitneys and regulation of their routesand hours. Unable to pay the $2,500 bond, many jitneys ceased operating, though 250 werestill running in May.The Port of Seattle had reduced its wharfage rates by at least thirty percent sinceit started. To protect private dock owners from this competition, the legislature passeda bill to enlarge the Port Commission to five members and to give the Public Service115First proposed in 1917 to carryworkers to the shipyards, when thetrolly line above Railroad Avenuewas completed on 4 September,1919 it was scarcely noted exceptby West Seattle commuters. Untilit was condemned only ten yearslater, the elevated ride offered aquick and exciting—it swayed—way above the tideland’s trestlesand Duwamish Waterway to reachthe “bedroom community.” Thisview looks west on WashingtonStreet from First Avenue South, itsnorthern terminus, and was mostlikely recorded either on its firstday or soon after the line opened.

116 Part ThreeCommission authority over rate fixing. It was hoped that port commissioners elected fromoutside Seattle would dilute the power of the present commission. Kempster reported toPSTP&L’s Boston office that it would now be “impossible” for the Port Commission toraise “any additional capital expenditures requiring bond issues.”Not satisfied with the injunctive power of the courts, the Employers’ Associationsucceeded in getting the legislature to pass an antipicketing bill. So pleased was the EA thatit announced in issue number six of its Legislative Bulletin: “No legislature of this statehas ever been so attentive to the wishes and demands of the taxpayers as the members ofthe present session. In almost every case no action, favorable or against any of the bills thathave been introduced hasbeen taken without firstascertaining the wishesof their constituents.” TheEA’s ecstasy was shortlived. The Card and LabelLeague led a successfulpetition drive to suspendimplementation of the billuntil Washington citizenshad a chance to vote onit by referendum. A splitoccurred in the JointLegislative Committeewhen the WashingtonState Grange supportedthe bill. (The committeeincluded the grange andthe Washington StateFederation of Labor.)In addition, because ofconcern about how theCourtesy U.W. Libraries, Special CollectionsZealous city police smash a Seattle drug store suspected of selling alcoholduring Hi Gill’s return as a self-proclaimed “reformed mayor.”antisaloon Initiative3 would be applied inspecific situations, two initiatives were generated. Initiative 18 (the Brewers’ Hotel Bill)would allow hotel dining rooms to serve liquor; Initiative 24 would permit the manufactureand direct sale of beer to consumers, thereby bypassing bootleggers.Statewide prohibition inaugurated the new year, 1916. On New Year’s Day,the police department’s Dry Squad conducted illegal raids on the homes of the aviationpioneer William E. Boeing, the cement manufacturer John Eden, and the mill owner DavidSkinner, setting the tone for the rest of the year. Enforcement of the dry laws flushedout a cast of comic-opera characters and heralded things to come, when the whole nationwould embark on the prohibition crusade. The historian Norman Clark emphasizes thatthe 1916 law did not require that the state be “bone dry.” Individuals were still permittedto import as much as two quarts of hard liquor or twelve quarts of beer every twenty days

y acquiring a permit from the county auditor’soffice. Impressive queues formed outside theoffice on the first working day of 1916, and byAugust some eighteen thousand permits hadbeen issued. During the first three months of theyear, thirty-five new “drug stores” had opened.Once loopholes were spied out, a black marketfor permits developed. Demand outran supply,driving up prices for bootleg booze to five dollarsa quart by December. The ebullient Mayor Gillrelished his new role. Newspapers exulted incovering Dry Squad raids, particularly when Gillcould be pictured axe in hand trashing storesand restaurants. Two restaurants lost twentythousand dollars in fixtures alone. Even the archprohibitionistRev. Mark Matthews objected tothis heavy-handedness.Presaging the future, the Stewart StreetPharmacy, owned by the Billingsley brothers,had resisted bootlegging charges several timesuntil the day a truck full of liquor was seizedat the store as it was being unloaded. In a fit ofexuberance, the Dry Squad destroyed the entireCity Politics, 1904 - 1916117The studio poster for the film The EternalGrind.The two larger steamers featured herewere added by the Puget Sound NavigationCompany to enhance the swank and speedof its service, principally between Seattle andTacoma. Soon after the new H.B. Kennedy,seen here approaching Colman Dock, wasbrought around in 1909 from Portland whereshe was built, the ship was tested for speed.With Joshua Green and other company VIPsriding on top, the throttle was opened wideand she managed an impressive twentyone-and-a-halfmiles per hour. Four yearslater the Forty-five year-old Green launchedthe Tacoma from Moran’s shipyard, a fewpiers south of Colman Dock. GovernorLister attended and his daughter Florencedid the 1913 christening. Here the brandnew Tacoma lies along the south side ofColman Dock. When underway she wasthe world’s fastest single-screw vesselas rated by Lloyd’s of London. While theTacoma’s Seventy-seven minute passage toTacoma was still somewhat slower than theInterurban Railroad, the ride on Puget Soundwas both more luxurious and exhilarating. Inher first fifteen years she carried six millionpassengers more than one million miles.However, with motorcars and passableroads becoming increasingly commonplacethe Tacoma proved to be the last steel-hulledsteamer built on Puget Sound.

118 Part ThreeFirst news of the Pacific Coast’s “Greatest Strike in History,” reported in the The Post-Intelligencer, left, and TheSeattle Star, right, 1 June 1916.store. More sophisticated operations were called for, so the brothers organized a mockcompany to ship liquor from Cuba to Canada. From Canada the liquor was easy to bootlegsouthward. However, an ex-policeman named Jack Marquett already had a corner on thismarket. (Marquett was perhaps the role model for the 1920s King of the Rumrunners,another ex-policeman, Roy Olmstead.) In a July shootout between Marquett and theBillingsleys, two men were killed.As the economy improved, prolonged and turbulent strikes and lockouts becamecommon. The ubiquitous Employers’ Association tried to protect the general public fromseeing the horrors of the workplace by applying to the Seattle Censor Board to suppress theshowing of The Eternal Grind, a movie starring Mary Pickford that depicted the workingconditions in sweatshops. Labor conflict reached a crescendo in November 1916 with theEverett Massacre.When the year began, a strike by the Shipyard Workers Union was already inprogress against the largest manufacturer of steel ships in the city, the Seattle Constructionand Dry Dock Company. The 400 strikers demanded a twenty-five percent wage increase,double pay for overtime work, and negotiations directly with the foremen instead of theemployers’ Metal Trades Association. While the personnel director, John V. Patterson(also the secretary of the Employers’ Association), was out of town, the company’s DavidRodgers agreed to the union demands. Patterson abrogated this agreement upon his returnand put the men on piecework. The strike resumed, dragging on until mid-June, when thecompany accepted the union’s terms.While this strike ran its course, another major strike—against the Mosquito Fleetowners—got under way. In February the workers had organized themselves into the PugetSound Steamshipmen’s Union and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. In late March aboutfive hundred workers went on strike, asking for union recognition and wage increases of $5to $15 a month. Anticipating the strike, Joshua Green’s Puget Sound Navigation Companyhad imported black strikebreakers. Violence, accentuated by the race factor, flared up. The

City Politics, 1904 - 1916 119Puget Sound Navigation Company, the largest of the fleet operators, threatened the othercompanies with retaliation if they signed a union contract. All of the affected unions inthe maritime trades soon united as the Seattle Waterfront Federation. They reportedly hadalmost one-half of the employers signed up by mid-April.As this strike progressed, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)launched a coastwise strike on the first of June. (The two strikes subsequently merged.)Besides a wage hike, the ILA demanded that pay be effective from the time employeeswere ordered to report in every morning and that they be guaranteed at least two hours ofpay if there was no work after they reported in. They also asked for a nine-hour workday,an hourly wage hike of five cents, and one dollar an hour for overtime; they also requestedthat gangs working in holds be of no fewer than eight men.Ronald Magden, a historian of the longshoremen’s union, records that almost threethousand “fishermen, steamboatmen, truckers, checkers, and longshoremen” picketedSeattle docks when ILA Local 38-12 struck in Seattle. Their strike was more complicatedand violent than that of the other unions. Asians, except for Japanese, and blacks werehired as strikebreakers, and the Waterfront Employers’ Union (WEU) advertised for morestrikebreakers in eastern Washington. On 3 June a confrontation that started as a fistfightended in a shooting; a striker and a strikebreaker were wounded. That day both the ToyoKisen Kaisha Steamship Company and Frank Waterhouse’s charter company signedcontracts. On 5 June the Port of Seattle accepted Local 38-12’s terms, as did the RothschildStevedoring Company and the West Seattle Grain Elevator Company on 8 June. Meanwhile,federal mediation efforts in San Francisco brought a truce on 9 June, with the ILA agreeingto return to work at wage scales submitted to the WEU on the 1 May. A referendum of theILA would be conducted coastwise, and if approved, the federal mediator Henry Whitewould seek a permanent settlement. Except for those working at Los Angeles’s San Pedroport, all strikers returned to work on 10 June.Strikebreakers worked side by side with strikers while mediation proceeded.Two shooting deaths interrupted mediation efforts in the Bay Area in mid-June, inspiringthe San Francisco Riggers and Stevedores Union to strike on 21 June; other West Coastlongshoremen’s unions followed suit. Seattle shipowners then hired university studentsand blacks as strikebreakers. Because of the mounting tensions, federal mediators wereunable to get the parties back together. So the shipowners decided on a broad assault. Ledby the chamber of commerce president Thomas Burke, a contingent of employers metwith Mayor Gill on 23 June. Gill feared losing trade to the Bay Area and promised theemployers 150 armed deputies to keep the peace. He also created a special police force,paid for by the employers, to infiltrate the Central Labor Council. When one striker was shotdead, a protest meeting of one thousand was held at Dreamland Pavilion on 2 July. Addingeven more pressure, some steamship companies boycotted the Port’s docks in retaliationfor its concession to union demands; the employers even refused the Municipal League’soffer to mediate. They met resistance finally when Governor Lister refused their request tobring in the state militia. A San Francisco shipowner, Captain Robert Dollar, urged fellowbusinessmen to hire thugs to beat up strikers and followed up with a campaign to raise$1 million for an open shop drive along the entire coast. Seattle businessmen subscribed$200,000 to the cause.

120 Part ThreeSixty-nine strikers were arrested when Judge Jeremiah Neterer granted aninjunction to prevent picketing of the Alaska Steamship Company. The Municipal Newscomplained of “anarchy” and “wrongful acts” and alleged that strikers were destroyingthe company’s business. The Municipal League’s partiality for the employers was notsurprising, considering that the organization was composed primarily of professionals andbusinessmen. League members did not understand the unions’ belief in exercising theirFirst Amendment rights to fight the unilateral exercise of power. Strikes undertaken bylabor unions are the last resort, decided upon by labor officers when collective bargainingfails. And when employers—historically supported by the courts and local constabulary,even the National Guard—hire strikebreakers, some violence typically occurs. Strikesessentially represent the assertion of First Amendment rights and are intended, in part,to counter the power of employers. Given their backgrounds, most league members wereprobably tempted to conclude that if there had been no strike, there would have been noviolence; therefore, in their eyes, unions were responsible for the violence.Magden writes, “For 127 days the Seattle waterfront resembled a battleground.. . . There were fist fights, knife cuttings, dock bombings, pier fires, shooting duels, andmurders. Spies infiltrated each other’s organizations. Gunfire strafed both the WaterfrontEmployers’ union and the ILA halls.” One striker was stabbed to death on 6 September,The headline and satiric cartoon from 15 July 1916 issue of the Seattle Union Record is printed here side by sidewith Captain Robert Dollar’s portrait as printed on the title page of Memoirs of Robert Dollar.

City Politics, 1904 - 1916121Courtesy, U.W. Libraries, Special CollectionsThis photograph of the IWW “fort” at 1115 Hewitt Avenue in Everett was recorded sometime after the docksideshooting of the “Everett Massacre” and during the trial. One of those posing members holds a “Workers RememberYour Dead Poster,” which Everett historian/librarian Margaret Riddle notes was issued following the Massacre.another beaten to death the next day. By 21 September, 850 strikebreakers were workingthe private docks, except for Rothschild’s.The federal mediator William Blackman was able to get the WEU and unionrepresentatives together on 1 October. They reached a tentative agreement. But beforeunion voting could take place, fifty strikers attacked strikebreakers who were headed to theGrand Trunk dock to be paid. The WEU then reneged on the agreement and submitted alist of one thousand names from which deputies could be selected to protect strikebreakers.On 4 October the ILA called off the strike. The terms of maritime employment remainedthe same, for the most part, until the historic 1934 maritime strike.Two epitaphs were written by participants in this climactic strike. One, by JamesRoston, an African American, describes the key role that blacks played in the strike. Blackshad been excluded from the ILA. Consequently, marine employers regularly used them aswell as Chinese and Filipinos as strikebreakers. The race card lay ready for the employersto play when they needed to disrupt union organizing. The black-owned NorthwestEnterprise credited Roston with playing a decisive role in breaking the 1916 strike bysupplying strikebreakers through his Northwest Stevedores and Truckers Association. Therace factor would not be minimized in the maritime trades until the ILA eliminated thecolor line during the 1934 strike. Kenneth Kerr, editor of the Railway and Marine News,wrote a second epitaph in the magazine’s February 1917 issue. “No greater victory for theemployers was ever recorded. Not one point was gained by the striking longshoremen.

122 Part ThreeOther men took their places.” Sixty percent of the original strikers had left the docks byOctober, and the remaining ones, according to Kerr, had “abjectly crawled” back to beg“for work at a greatly reduced rate.”Industrial relations clearly gravitated toward class warfare. The Everett Massacreof November and events leading up to it dramatized this trend. Organized labor in Seattlewas gradually drawn into the statewide Shingle Weavers Union strike that began on 1 May1916. Although half of the state’s mills had signed union contracts, the Everett mill ownersstood solidly opposed to them. In 1914 the owners had cut wages; now they were uniformlyrejecting the workers’ request to return to the previous wage scale, although one employer,the lumberman David Clough, had promised to do so in 1915. The Everett CommercialClub had once been a broadly based community organization, but as tensions grew in themill town most of the more moderate members had resigned, leaving the club largely in thecontrol of the mill owners. Their model for the ideal society was the company town. Nowthe town was theirs. The historian Norman Clark writes, “[T]he waterfront bristled againwith barbed wire, bunkhouses, searchlights, guns, and armed guards.”In July the Seattle office of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies,took notice of events in Everett. Seeking to bolster its decimated membership, the IWWbrought in the organizer James Rowan. Rowan repeatedly went to Everett, was arrested,and returned to Seattle bypolice. The IWW hopedto flood the Everett jailsas they had in Spokaneduring a successfulfight for free speech in1909. On 22 Augustthe Snohomish Countysheriff, Donald McRae,ordered all Wobblies toleave Everett. He alsoblockaded all majorpoints of entry by land.A group of about twentyfrom Seattle tested thisedict and were promptlyarrested and shippedback. McRae headed offanother invasion by tugThe IWW was also known for itssongs and satire. The Pyramid ofCapitalist System cartoon managedwith few words and pleasingsymmetry to show the Wobblyposition on class struggle andexpress their revolutionary maximthat the boss and the worker hadnothing in common.

City Politics, 1904 - 1916123A photograph, bottom-left, of the steamer Verona passing by Colman Dock, has been added to a montage of newsphotographs and headlines sensationally announcing the Everett Massacre and illustrating some of its casualtiesin the morning paper, The Post-Intelligencer, for Monday, 6 November, 1916, the day following the battle on theEverett waterfront.from Mukilteo in late September. Inside the mill town, violence against Wobblies whowere there before the edict continued, prompting the president of the Washington StateFederation of Labor, Ernst Marsh, to come to their defense. He came despite the AFL’sbitter opposition to the IWW because it split the labor movement with its syndicalist tactics.Marsh’s attempt to stage a mass protest failed. Under McRae’s blockade, the city came toresemble a police state. Then on 31 October, forty-one men left Seattle by boat and dockedin Everett, where two hundred sheriffs and deputies seized them. The police then cartedthem off to Beverly Park, where they were savagely beaten. One mill owner, Joe Irving,bragged, “We took down their pants and beat them with Devil’s Club—you know, the plantwith the heavy stalk and poisonous thorns . . . and made them run the gauntlet.”Marsh again tried to organize a protest meeting but was upstaged by the IWW’sSeattle office, which declared on 5 November that “the entire history of the organization

124 Part Threewill be decided in Everett.” A contingent of about two hundred men set sail from Seattle onthe Verona. McRae’s heavily armed forces awaited their arrival. What followed is knownas the Everett Massacre.When the Verona was docked and the crew was preparing to lower the gangplank,Sheriff McRae, accompanied by Joe Irving and two deputies—one of whom, JeffersonBeard, would be shot through his back—approached the Verona. McRae shouted above thenoise of the crowd, “You can’t land here.” Who fired the first shot has not been determined,but more than one hundred men poured out of the warehouse. Many of these men hadweapons, as did the deputies who were on tugboats offshore, which strongly suggests thatthey were expecting an armed confrontation. Once the firing started, the only option for theVerona’s skipper was to crank up the engine and break the towline if possible; he succeeded.After the boat arrived in Seattle, a National Guard unitsent by Governor Lister escorted the passengers to jail.The number of casualties has never been determined, buton the deck of the Verona, four were dead and twentyeightwounded (one of whom later died). Many of thoseon the ship had jumped into the water and were shot atby the deputies on the tugboats; it is unclear how manydied or survived. Beard and Lieutenant Charles Curtisseem to have been the only fatalities among those on thedock, though many there suffered wounds.In Seattle, Mayor Gill, who was no friend of theWobblies or the unions, claimed that the authorities, notthe IWW, were responsible for the killings. He distributedtobacco to the Wobblies who had been transferred toSeattle jails. Seattleites became preoccupied with theirfate, organizing mass meetings in the city and elsewherein the state. The trial began in Judge James Ronald’scourt on 5 March. George F. Vanderveer defended theWobblies, earning his reputation as “counsel for thedamned.” One month after the trial started, the UnitedGeorge F. Vanderveer, “Counsel forthe Damned.”States declared war, and the trial faded from prominence. During this momentary diversion,the Wobblies were acquitted. Vanderveer would soon find himself in a less friendly courtdefending the Socialist Hulet Wells for distributing anticonscription literature before theSelective Service Act had even been passed.The many acts passed by the 1915 legislature preoccupied the pressure groupsas the November 1916 general election drew near. Altogether, there were nine pieces oflegislation awaiting referendum that were intended to overrule various reforms enactedby the 1909, 1911, and 1913 legislatures. Many clearly demonstrated the class bias of that“businessmen’s legislature.” Up for voter approval were bills, as noted previously, thatimpeded the direct legislation process, prevented municipal corporations from competingwith private ones, thwarted peaceful picketing, or applied prohibition laws unequally tosocial classes.For example, Referenda 3 and 4 required citizens to sign petitions only in the

egistration offices and before the registration officer. Thisprocess would work, of course, if an officer could be found andif the office were not whimsically closed. Many southern stateshad similar legislation. The Whitney convention bill wouldreplace the direct primary with the caucus primary and wouldpractically eliminate independent candidacies. The antipicketingact needs no comment as to its class bias. The certificate-ofnecessitybill was intended to obstruct municipal ownership andhome rule, as was the Port bill. Referendum 24 would allowonly hotel dining rooms to serve liquor (few blue-collar workersfrequented them). The Renick budget bill, like the certificate-ofnecessitybill, was designed to impede municipal ownership byprohibiting the transfer of one department’s surplus to anotherdepartment with insufficient funds. A constitutional amendmentthat would require a property test for voters underscored the classbias of this 1915 legislature.The Municipal League’s position on these measuresCity Politics, 1904 - 1916125indicates the prevailing attitudes of the middle class at the time. In accordance with its originalopposition to abusive monopoly power, the league opposed the certificate-of-necessity billand the Port bill. It favored the Renick budget bill. It overruled the majority report of itscommittee on voter property qualifications and opposed the amendment. The league tookno position on the antipicketing bill, and it chose neutrality on the prohibition amendments.The Washington Federation of Women’s Clubs chose neutrality on all referenda; the newofficers overruled the federation’s former “altruistic” officers, who had objected to theamendments. Voters resoundingly defeated all nine measures. The antipicketing measurelost by 97,370 votes; the hotel liquor bill lost by 215,036 votes. The margin of defeat ofthe others ranged between130,000 and 155,000votes. In 1921 thelegislature would tryto enact comparablelegislation, with the sameresult. And, once more,the legislature woulddemonstrate its remotenessfrom, or indifference to,the voters.When Henry Suzzallotook over the presidencyof the University ofWashington on 4 JulyCourtesy UW Libraries, Special CollectionsUniversity of Washington President Henry Suzzallo, far left.ProfessorJ. Allen SmithCourtesy UW Libraries,Special Collections1915 from the actingpresident, Henry Landes,he found 3,225 students

126 Part Threeenrolled for the fall term—less than half the number at comparable institutions. So fewgraduate students were registered that the school was denied membership in the prestigiousAssociation of American Universities. Suzzallo saw as his first task the education of thecitizenry about the university’s potential for contributing to the region’s welfare. He setabout this before the fall term began.He quickly launched a statewide tour, spreading word of the university’s role as“a scientific institution, grouping scientific men and interests” and its role of developingnot only “theoretical truths” but also “practical truths” in which “the public is interested.”Continuing this barnstorming into November, Suzzallo stressed the need to “intellectualize”engineering, forestry, and agriculture to better serve practical goals. Wherever he went,he mobilized the alumni. He managed to ruffle a few feathers in eastern Washington byinsisting that the University of Washington should become the training ground for all theprofessions, except agriculture, while Washington State College (WSC) at Pullman shouldintensify its efforts to become a great agricultural school. His condescension was perhapscolored by the appointment of his former student, Ernest O. Holland, to the presidency ofWSC in 1916.Suzzallo pressed his advantage before Holland assumed his responsibilities,regularly consulting with the recently appointed Washington State Commission ofEducational Survey, readily supplying the surveyors with his opinions, and answering theirmany queries. His and the commission’s common ground was the search for efficiency.Not surprisingly, the commission’s April 1916 report favored the UW by showing that itwas undersupported compared to WSC. Suzzallo’s employment of Governor Lister as anaccounting teacher in the university’s extension division during the spring and summer of1915 undoubtedly helped the UW’s cause as well.A Post-Intelligencer cartoonencouraging enlistment.A patriotic Seattle Star cartoon of Uncle Sam bends the popular religious maxim about “sowing” and “reaping”into a promotion for joining Seattle’s “monster demonstration” for war preparedness.

Crack political cartoonist Satterfield embraces the officialline about foreign spies in Seattle during World War I.The cartoon appeared in The Seattle Sun.City Politics, 1904 - 1916127Suzzallo spent much of histime in Olympia during the 1917 statelegislative session. The legislatureestablished the Higher EducationCurriculum Board to oversee thecurriculum at the state’s colleges anduniversities in the future. However,the legislature turned the matter of thecurrent curriculum over to the governorafter failing to articulate a program.Given the final say, Lister proceeded togive the UW the exclusive right to offerinstruction in law, architecture, forestry,commerce, journalism, fisheries, marineand aeronautical engineering, and libraryeconomy. WSC was allotted exclusiveinstruction in agriculture, veterinarymedicine, and economics as it relatedto agriculture. Duplication was allowedin liberal arts; pure science; pharmacy;mining; civil, electrical, mechanical, andchemical engineering; home economics;and the professional training of highschool teachers, school supervisors, and superintendents. The antagonism generated bythis favoritism erupted in the mid-1920s when the Everett mill owner Roland Hill Hartleybecame governor. Hartley was then able to readily mobilize leaders in eastern Washingtonfor support in implementing his agenda.At the University of Washington, Suzzallo was unsettled by some social reformerson the faculty. He wrote to his mentor and role model Nicholas Murray Butler, president ofColumbia University, that “a group of radicals were ruling the faculty and the students bysheer aggressiveness.” He was referring to J. Allen Smith, Teresa and Edward McMahon,and Joseph K. Hart—all were believed by downtown business leaders to be socialists.Hart and Herbert Lull, in the school of education, were publicly feuding with the dean,Frederick E. Bolton. Hart’s cause was not helped by his editorship of the Northwest Journalof Education, in which an article alleged that Butler was trying to take over the nation’sA scene from the 10 June, 1916Preparedness Parade as it headssouth on First Avenue. The banneron the side of the flag-draped truckreads “Labor is Driving.”

128 Part ThreeBoth view courtesy Museum of History and IndustryTwo local views of World War One recruitment. Left, enlisted men march south on Second Avenue approachingStewart Street in the Draft Day Parade. Right, Marine recruiters pose in their motorcycles on Stewart Street besidethe south façade of the New Washington Hotel.higher education system through his intellectual offspring. Suzzallo believed Hart was theauthor. When Suzzallo fired him, Hart appealed to the American Association of UniversityProfessors. The association concurred with the president, contending that conditions inthe school alone justified his dismissal. Suzzallo then fired Lull and reappointed Bolton asdean.Smith was another matter. As the author of the controversial Spirit of AmericanGovernment, an authority on municipal government, and the intellectual leader of thecity’s reform forces, Smith could not escape controversy. Suzzallo threatened to fireSmith if he continued his public lectures on controversial subjects. Smith resisted. Insteadof dismissing Smith, Suzzallo chose to break up the department of political and socialscience, establishing a sociology department and a school of commerce. Smith remainedthe lone member of the political science department. Carleton Parker from the Universityof California was appointed head of the school of commerce and was permitted to hireRexford Tugwell and Stephen Miller. Parker would figure prominently during the war inproceedings of the Washington State Defense Council, chaired by Suzzallo.Though 1916 seemed a turbulent year, it was tame in comparison to 1917. Patriotismwas kindled in the United States by the ghastly war in Europe. Terrifying submarine warfarewas bringing the war home, causing the bells to toll for lost American lives. Consideringthat civic leaders like Alden Blethen were able to fire up patriotic fervor before the war, ashe did in promoting the Potlatch Riot of 1913, one can easily imagine what fervor actualpreparations for war and entry into the war could inspire. Before moving on to largerevents, we will look at the public schools and find a portent of events to come.War preparation measures in the schools were resisted by the school board and theCentral Labor Council, which were usually allied with the Parent-Teacher Association, theSeattle Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Municipal League. The board was pressuredas early as 1915 to permit military training in high schools, but the Socialist board memberRichard Winsor convinced the board to keep it out. Then, in the spring of 1916, the boardpermitted a recruiter to speak to high school students, thereby arousing the state PTA topropose a resolution opposing military training in the schools. In May the Seattle Federation

City Politics, 1904 - 1916129of Women’s Clubs protested against “military addresses of a political nature in the publicschools.” The board rejected a request from the Northwest Business Men’s PreparednessLeague to allow pupils to march in a preparedness parade. It also refused the request ofthe school district’s medical officer that marching drills be introduced into the physicaleducation program.The superintendent, Frank Cooper, resisted these pressures, as he would duringthe war. When the nation entered the war in April 1917, the U.S. Army asked the boardto introduce the School Guard program into the curriculum in the form of an afterschoolmilitary drill. Cooper said no to the board because of overcrowded buildings, theundesirability of distinctive uniforms, and the incursion on pupils’ time. He also questionedthe program’s educational value. The board overruled him. Nevertheless, recruiters werestill denied admittance to the schools and forbidden access to lists of students eligible forthe military.One particularly nettlesome group with which educators had to contend was theMinute Men, a paramilitary organization endorsed by the mayor and chief of police asbeing a respectable extension of local government. Although the group’s activities will becovered more extensively below, it is relevant to note here that the Minute Men targetedteachers and principals who were suspected of not supporting the war effort and who resistedindoctrinating their students according to Section 232 of the school code, which requiredthem to “impress patriotism” on their students’ young minds. Immediately suspect wereofficials and teachers with German names, including Cooper’s good friend Otto Luther,principal of Queen Anne High School. The group was also instrumental in recalling AnnaLouise Strong from the school board as a result of her pacifist activities.Members of the Washington National Guard march to troop trains waiting for them on Railroad Avenue. The sceneis dated 25 June, 1916, and the photographer looks south from near the foot of Union Street. The Milwaukee Pier(No. 57) is on the right.Courtesy, Lawton Gowey

130 Part FourPart FourWar Time: Preparedness to BelligerencyBy 1917 shipyards were running at capacity and the harbor’s ability to handle all theshipping was stretched. All but three shipyards recognized the unions: Seattle Constructionand Dry Dock Company, Ames Shipbuilding Company, and Duthie Shipyards. The relativelyhigh wages drew workers from other occupations, which caused shortages elsewhere. Twothousand men were hired by the Seattle Construction and Dry Dock Company in March.Ames’s yard landed a contract with Cunard of Great Britain for nine ships; his workforceexpanded from 500 men to 3,000. The day that the United States declared war, 6 April1917, Skinner and Eddy Shipyards executed one of the largest real estate deals in the city’shistory, purchasing fifteen acres on the waterfront for $1.5 million. In June it bought theadjacent Centennial Flour Mill property for $600,000. Skinner and Eddy would soon buySeattle Construction and Dry Dock. The Lake Washington Ship Canal was dedicated on 4July to the cheering of one hundred thousand spectators.Opening day of the LakeWashington Ship Canal,July 4, 1917.Top: A mid-way inauguralprocession scene looksnorth across the canaland into Fremont.Bottom: The SS Rooseveltenters MontlakeCut (before the bridge)to soon bring to an endthe day’s procession ofboats through the lengthof the new canal and intoLake Washington.

The increase inshipbuilding meant that the cityneeded a better street railwaysystem. Because the U.S.Shipping Board’s EmergencyFleet Corporation contracted withSeattle’s shipyards, it could—and did—exert pressure on theCity to provide the necessarytransportation. Neither PSTP&Lnor the city was prepared for thistask. Because of this transportationcrisis, the City became mired in abond debt to PSTP&L that set thestage for the climactic struggleover public ownership in the1920s and 1930s.In late January 1917,after ten long months of fighting,mainly with the powerful PugetSound Navigation Company’sJoshua Green, workers endedtheir strike against the MosquitoFleet owners. Union contractswere signed, wage increases werewon, 700 members were claimedby the unions, and scabs were laidoff.New leadership in theSeattle Federation of Women’sClubs set a radical standard. ViolaG. Crahan became president ofthe federation and immediatelytook aim at laundry owners byorganizing clubs for their femaleworkers in December 1916.Their wages had averaged $5.87War Time: Preparedness to Belligerency131The 1909 photo, top, of the garment works float in the Labor DayParade is one indication of trade union activism emerging amongwomen works. In the ca. 1912 photo, above, the banner reads,“Delegation Waitresses Union 400 Strong All Working.” By 1917the Waitresses Union, under the leadership of Alice Lord, wonan employment office in the Labor Temple. Also in 1917 thesuccessful strike of the laundry workers inspired women in thecandy and cracker factories to strike. And as described belowSeattle’s telephone operators joined in a 1916 coast-wide strike.The crucial political campaigning of the Card and Label League andtheir conduct of boycotts against anti-union employers cementedrespect from the male dominated union. This was true even onthe point of “equal pay for equal work” once women entered maledominated trades during the war, although the underlying motivefor this activism was to protect their union wage scale.a week, and those believed by the owners to be involved in union activities were firedand then blacklisted to discourage others from employing them. In mid-June 1917, ninehundred laundry workers struck.Five owners quickly signed union contracts, and just as suddenly they felt therough hand of the Laundry Owners Club. The club had an agreement by which it couldtake over and operate the plant of any member who recognized the union. Two ownerswere testing this authority in court. Public sentiment swung to the union when the club

132 Part Fourtried to fine L. V. Williams of the Peerless Laundry for violating the owners’ agreement.Strikebreakers were brought in, but they soon joined the union, swelling membership to1,550 by the end of June. Victory came on 12 July: twenty-seven laundries began payingthe union wage of $9 a week for apprentices and $10 for journeymen.Taking advantage of the public fear of Wobblies propagated by the newspapersand faced with unsettling union successes, the state legislators excitedly enacted anantisyndicalism bill. The bill was directed at unions in general, not just at the IWW, whichwas a syndicalist organization intent on destroying capitalism with a general strike andestablishing worker control. The legislature was deliberately painting AFL unions, includingthose belonging to the Central Labor Council, and the Wobblies with the same brush. Acontinuing dilemma for the AFL leadership, as demonstrated during the events leading tothe recent Everett Massacre, was how to defend the Wobblies’ constitutional right to freespeech and association yet avoid being associated with them in the popular mind. Guiltby association, of course, was the aim of the legislators who promoted the bill and theirbackers. Business leaders and legislators used the war as the pretext for pursuing open shopobjectives. Governor Lister vetoed the bill, finding it too inclusive. The nation’s belligerentstatus hardly affected industrial relations. A lockout by the sign company Foster and Kleiserwas quickly settled. When the “hell hole of Seattle,” the Washington Iron Works, refused toput its workers on an equal footing with those in similar plants, two hundred workers walkedout. Upon the declaration of war, the Central Labor Council sent a telegram to PresidentWoodrow Wilson in protest. Downtown, at almost the same time, a man by the name ofCaptain Bunn addressed an audience of businessmen at the Harvard Club, claiming that an“internal industrial revolution” might be upon the city within forty-eight hours and that heA flatbed truck (still with hard tires) converted into a war industries factory presents the Hun and Uncle Sam, theFirst World War’s two stock characters. This Uncle either steadies the hefty citizen behind him or is steadied byhim. The skirt of this float offers limited wartime alternatives: either “Buy a Bond or Fight.”

was training twenty-five businessmen atAmerican Lake for the event. Attestingto the mood of organized labor, 4,500people gathered on 15 April at DreamlandPavilion to protest the threatened hangingof Tom Mooney for his alleged part inthe bombing of a July 1916 preparednessparade in San Francisco.Catching the patriotic fever, eventhe moderate Municipal League asserted,“The time for debate has ended. . . . Wewill encourage others to be loyal andwill stamp out disloyalty wherever wemay find it.” In July the league, actingon advice from its committee on theconduct of the war, recommended thatGovernor Lister call a special legislativesession to amend the militia code so thatits members could engage in “necessarysecret work.” The session, it was hoped,would define actions that hinderedprosecution of the war, such as strikesand pacifist protests—this would directlyaffect organized labor. The declaration ofmartial law seemed appropriate to leaguemembers, who recommended setting upinternment camps to corral dissenters.As 1917 neared its end, the Employers’Association also asked for a speciallegislative session to force allegedslackers to work or go to jail: “No oneshould eat bread in the sweat of anotherman’s brow. . . . Such idleness breedsdisloyalty, treason, sedition, anarchy, andvice. . . . The legislature should enact alaw to make it a criminal offence . . . forany able bodied man to remain willfullyidle.” War hysteria had converted the EAand Municipal League into bedfellows.War Time: Preparedness to Belligerency133Strikes, rumors of strikes, riots, and more aretrumpeted with headlines in this montage of partsfrom a few Post-Intelligencer front pages, 17 July to25 July, 1917.

134 Part FourStrikers and sympathizers crowded Second Avenue for the advance of two trolleys sent out on the third day ofthe motorman and conductor’s 1917 strike that shut down PSTP&L’s service. The view looks north up SecondAvenue from James Street to a cloud of commotion near Columbia Street where the trolleys, both loaded withpolice and surrounded by them, make their slow way south towards Pioneer Square where, it would develop, ariot awaited them.Just as the Puget Sound Traction, Power and Light Company was facing laborunrest, the Municipal League mounted criticism of the company’s deteriorating tractionoperation. It charged the firm with being a “tramp” because of its outmoded and inefficientservice. Instead of improving its operations, the Municipal League claimed, it concentratedon putting the jitneys out of competition, “all to protect its capital.” The company’s laborpolicies were also coming under fire. In light of the rising cost of living, the Streetcarmen’sUnion had achieved almost 100 percent success in organizing, but PSTP&L’s A. W. Leonardrefused in June to negotiate. When two union men were fired and others threatened, theworkers began a strike on 16 July, the very day the great lumber strike spread across thestate.Though it had opposed the 1916 longshoremen’s strike, the Municipal Leaguesupported this one, blasting Stone and Webster for refusing to recognize the union, forreneging on its franchise obligations to the City to pay two percent on its gross revenues,and for not paying its share of the cost of the canal bridges. All signs pointed to “internaldisorder,” in the league’s estimation.PSTP&L began importing strikebreakers, housing them in its Georgetown facility.No cars were run that week from Tuesday through Thursday, but it planned to run ten fromits Fremont car barn on Friday, providing that they received police protection. Mayor Gillfired thirteen policemen who refused to ride with the strikebreakers. Lacking sufficientpolice protection, the company chose to run only two cars to test the opposition. Whenthe cars arrived at a point between Yesler Way and Washington Street, violence brokeout—about twenty people were injured, several people were arrested, and the two carswere demolished.

War Time: Preparedness to Belligerency135A citizens’ petition bearing about 4,500 names urged reinstatement of thedischarged policemen. Donations poured in for their defense. The manager of the tractiondivision, A. L. Kempster, reported to the Boston office that the strike was now “a test ofwits rather than a test of strength though we have placed in our Georgetown shops some 500strikebreakers and are prepared to operate . . . on short notice. . . . The city administrationhas not shown much desire to be caught between opposing lines of the Company and thestrikers during the last week.” Kempster blamed the shipyard workers for pressuring thecompany’s trainmen to take advantage of the labor shortage by organizing; “our men” havebeen “stampeded,” Kempster complained.Leonard asked the mayor and city council to request federal troops. Instead,Governor Lister came to the city to restore shipyard production to its capacity. He quicklyappointed the UW president, Henry Suzzallo (as head of the Washington State DefenseCouncil), to chair an arbitration board. Leonard still refused to recognize the union andto agree to any arbitration decision. However, the strike was won by 2 August. In lateSeptember the arbitration board determined that a living wage must be paid to those inpublic employment, a novel idea for the time. Employees would receive a “comfort” wageto meet living expenses, five days of sick leave, and two days of “recreation” (unpaidCharles and Emma Frye were among the industrial trailblazers to the Seattle tidelands following the city’s GreatFire of 1889. Beginning in 1891 their packing company built its sprawling plant over acres of tideflats at thebottom of Beacon Hill. With their fortunes swelled by the Klondike Gold Rush they took to another pursuit atleast as dear to them as the company of cattle, sheep, hogs, and chickens. These children of German immigrantsvisited Europe principally to buy art, and lots of it. Their private collection of academy and genre art—much ofit featuring cows and sheep—became the basis for their namesake museum that they successfully endowed tosurvive with modern exhibit spaces and free admission.

136 Part Fourleave) monthly. Kempster thought the company emerged in good condition, not havingto concede the eight-hour workday, one of the stumbling blocks in the ongoing lumberstrike.One more familiar union target was struck after the trainmen’s strike, when theMeat Packers Union walked out of the Frye plant in early August. The union demanded tenhours’ pay for eight hours’ work and elimination of the requirement that they were to eat atthe company boardinghouse. After one week the strike was won. Other packinghouses fellin line.At the end of September, twelve hundred shipyard workers struck the nonunionyards. Not until 22 October was arbitration agreed to. And telephone workers, inspired bythe success of the laundry workers, signed with the International Brotherhood of ElectricalWorkers in early August, becoming Local 42-A. They had not received a pay increase since1913 and the companies had rejected their recent request for one, alleging that giving thema raise would be “unpatriotic.” So it came as no surprise when the “Hello Girls” struck allalong the coast in October, amid widespread sympathy from the public and many antiunionnewspapers. Federal authorities promised to help out. The operators returned to work, butthey resumed their walkout on 2 November, after federal intervention had failed to movethe companies. Finally, a mediation agreement was signed in early December, giving thestrikers “two-thirds” of their demands, according to the Union Record.Also inspired by theexample of the laundry workers,four hundred workers in candyand cracker factories struckin September. The Teamstersjoined them in a sympathy strike.However, the employers got alandmark court injunction in theSt. Germain Bakery case, whichresulted in a ban against picketing.The Washington State SupremeCourt ruled that the recentClayton Act (which modified theSherman Antitrust Act) did notapply to disputes confined withina state’s boundaries.Top: Office equipment and dress for “HelloGirls” in a 1902 photograph of a Seattleswitchboard. Bottom: Posing for theUnion Record photographer, members ofthe International Brotherhood of ElectricalWorkers flash copies of the labor paper’sheadline “Telephone Workers All Out.” Thetelephone operators have just walked outfor their 1916 coast-wide strike against thetelephone companies.

Even domestic workers became active in 1917.Alice Lord of the Waitresses Union reached out to“housemaids and domestic help” in mid-September. Anemployment office was opened for them in the LaborTemple. In general, women were entering traditionallymale professions, becoming machinists, shipyardworkers, and taxi drivers, for example. Reflecting thistrend, between 1900 and 1920 the number of singlewomen in the Seattle workforce expanded from 4,774to 33,114 and the number of married women from 881to 9,203. However, women were typically paid lessthan men for doing the same work. The Central LaborCouncil did not take kindly to this undercutting, so itappealed to the Industrial Welfare Commission and wonin principle, at least, the equal pay of women for equalwork.Most of the strikes noted above occurred afterthe conclusion of the most sensational strike of theperiod: the great strike in logging camps and lumber millsacross the state. The federal government’s interventionin this strike set a precedent that endured until the NewDeal of the 1930s. Loggers and mill workers in easternWashington and the Idaho panhandle began their protestin April 1917, seeking improved working conditions andan eight-hour workday. The IWW had been particularlyactive among the miners in this region. The AFL hadbeen equally active among the loggers and mill workersin western Washington. Lumbermen, having successfullyresisted unionization in the past, saw no reason nowto negotiate. The AFL strike began on 16 July. As thestrike gathered steam, the IWW joined, two days later.They agreed to make the eight-hour workday the mainissue. Twenty thousand men across the state walked offthe job. Employers could bank on public awareness thatthe logging camps and mills were IWW strongholdsand depend upon newspapers to play up the “Wobblyhorrors” and patriotic themes.Convinced that the IWW was a revolutionaryorganization, no government agency or employer wouldWar Time: Preparedness to Belligerency137The Post-Intelligencer’s terse earlyDecember 1917 coverage of thedebate within the Central LaborCouncil over the antiwar position ofthe IWW includes a concluding notethat “the council appropriated $200from its general fund for the relief ofgirl telephone operators who wereon strike and who are now withoutfunds.”deal with it. It was not uncommon for IWW offices to be raided and for members to simplybe rounded up and jailed at the whim of authorities. Raids and roundups were conductedat the Seattle office in September and November. By September, with the strike merelydragging on, the IWW decided to strike on the job instead of picketing, using slowdowns,sabotage, and other actions to lower productivity. Because of the IWW’s withdrawal from

138 Part Fourthe picket lines, control of the strike now gravitated toward the AFL. Nevertheless, theSeattle Chamber of Commerce conveniently insisted that the IWW was running the strike.The Washington State Defense Council was unable to mediate successfully. Longshoremenhelped strikers by refusing to handle any lumber produced in mills with ten-hour workdays.The IWW called off the strike in early October. But the AFL’s negotiator, J. G. Brown,insisted that the strike was still on and that a favorable outcome was not far away. BothGovernor Lister and the National Defense Council declared that they were in favor of astandard eight-hour workday and urged the lumbermen to agree. It was the only industrynot to have accepted this national standard.Because of the overriding importance of lumber for prosecuting the war, thefederal government finally stepped in. The War Department had learned from its secretagents (who had been employed by the Grays Harbor lumberman Alex Polson beforethe war) that the Wobblies were planning a general strike on 1 January and decided tohead it off. The department assigned Lieutenant Colonel Brice P. Disque to the PacificNorthwest, instead of to overseas duty, because of his familiarity with the industry and hisacceptance by lumbermen. Even the AFL’s Samuel Gompers and some Wobblies foundDisque acceptable.A reading of The Post-Intelligencer’s front page story below the banner headline “SOLDIER SHOT IN RIOT” revealsthat it was the 300 odd soldiers and sailors who were doing the rioting as they attempted to “storm the I.W.W.hall” and failed. Still following the riot the police locked up fifty-one Wobblies. The paper’s next day report onMonday June 18, 1917 confessed that the shooter who put a bullet through Private W. E. Miller’s leg on Saturdaynight could not be identified. Not too profoundly Police Chief Beckingham concluded, “The shot was fired bysome unknown person in the dark.” Also “thirty-seven of the I.W.W. arrested were released because of lack ofevidence.” Twelve who gave their ages as between twenty-one and thrity-one were held as “slacker suspects,”and were turned over to federal authorities for possible induction into the military.

War Time: Preparedness to Belligerency139Courtesy, University of Washington Libraries, Special CollectionsStanding with uniformed soldiers of the Signal Core, members of the Loyal Loggers attend a flag lowering—orraising—ceremony at a lumber mill at Aloha, near Ilwaco on the Olympic Peninsula. Standing at attention but notin uniforms, many of the “loyal loggers” are hidden behind the flag.Based on his prior experience, Disque decided to employ soldiers alongside civilianworkers and to create a civilian agency consisting of workers and lumbermen to deal withissues of working conditions and wages. To implement the first part of his program, heestablished the Spruce Production Division in the War Department. To implement thesecond part, he organized the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, the 4 Ls. NeedingGompers’s approval before negotiating with the lumbermen, Disque won him over bydownplaying the significance of the 4 Ls. Having gained Gompers’s approval, Disquereturned to the region, only to discover that a Lieutenant Crumpacker had been workingclosely with the lumbermen, promoting the 4 Ls. Against his will, Disque accepted whatCrumpacker had accomplished during his absence. The historian Harold Hyman, in hisSoldiers and Spruce, maintains that the Loyal Legion, not the Spruce Production Division,became the “primary instrument of Army policy.” Robert Tyler, in his Rebels of the Woods,writes that the 4 Ls filled the vacuum left by the failure of the AFL and IWW to establishnegotiations with the lumbermen. According to Tyler, the government created “its ownlabor organization,” the only one it would accept. The legion really was the government’sown creature, the perfect company union.The lumbermen blamed Henry Suzzallo, as head of the Washington State DefenseCouncil, and his chief assistant, Carleton Parker, for all the reform measures being calledfor, including the eight-hour workday. Edwin Ames was so impressed with the 4 Ls that heurged that all responsibility for labor negotiations be transferred to Disque; at the same time,he was organizing the Lumbermen’s Protective League to resist the imposition of the eighthourworkday. Once the threat of a general strike dissipated, the lumbermen concluded thatno reform was needed after all. Disque consented to the lumbermen’s request that they beallowed to expand the 4 Ls elsewhere. Also, he held over their heads the threat of a labor

140 Part Fourboard deciding to enforce the eight-hour workday if they did not accept it on their own. Ata meeting with the lumbermen in Portland on 27 and 28 February, Disque and his allieswon their acceptance of the eight-hour workday. Recalcitrants like Ames walked out of themeeting. And Roland Hartley would never forgive Suzzallo for his part in bringing aboutthe reforms in working conditions and wages. He had to wait until 1925 to waylay the UWpresident.The Russian Revolution contributed to 1917’s turmoil in industrial relations. TheCentral Labor Council applauded the revolution, thereby splitting it from the Federation ofLabor’s leadership at the state and national level and alienating much of the city’s middleclass. Local officials, abetted by the Minute Men, intensified their harassment of dissentersand “alien enemies.” Police and their vigilante helpers conducted raids in November onSocialist and IWW headquarters. In this atmosphere it was easy for citizens to link theRussian Revolution with the aspirations of America’s more radical groups and individualreformers.The Shilka incident of late December 1917 conveys the temper of the time. On 24December the Times reported, “Rifles and explosives found on Russian ship. Believed toCounting only ocean-going ships and none of the many vessels either in the lakes or operating on Puget Sound,the Post-Intelligencer reporter found fifty-four of them in the Seattle harbor on Saturday, 12 Jan, 1918. Thenumber gave strength to Sunday’s headline, “Seattle Shipping Has Vast Growth.” This next day report alsofeatures a photograph of the steamship Westwood at dedication. The Westwood was the second steel steamshipcompleted by the Ames plant in the thirteen months since the facility opened in December 1916, and, the papernoted, “Notwithstanding that the plant was tied up partially by a strike lasting two months.” Built under contractfor the Cunard Steamship Company, the Westwood was commandeered by the wartime Shipping Board whileunder construction.

e plot to arm IWW or to start a voyage asa Pacific commerce raider. . . . U.S. navalofficials believe it is to foment uprisingsin the U.S. . . . Committee runs ship. . .. Crew members are the worst kind ofBolsheviks and anarchists.” Twenty-onealleged IWW members were roundedup, “most of them Russians,” when theystarted a demonstration on the pier. TheAssociated Press claimed that the Shilkamight be involved in an “internationalplot to overthrow organized government.”There was also a “mysterious” cargo,which proved to be mainly licorice root.The Post-Intelligencer also gave the storyits front page banner, “I.W.W. GOLDSHIP HELD” but in the week followingboth papers retreated, recognizing thattheir sensational reports were unfounded.Adding to the city’s concerns wasthe loss of revenue since mid-Novemberthat was normally gained from servicemenon leave in the city’s hospitable environs.According to General Henry Greene,Seattle was too inviting. He had placedthe city off-limits to the approximatelyforty thousand soldiers stationed at CampLewis. Seattle was much too open a town.In response, the fast-fading Mayor Gill,of all people, replaced an accommodatingpolice chief, Charles Beckingham, withthe tougher Joel Warren on 1 December.Warren warned that “undesirables,whiskey, and seditious preachers mustgo. . . . Bootleggers, we will hammerhard . . . the whiskey game is the meanestand worst that this city has to combat.”For the moment, the police chief’s topWar Time: Preparedness to Belligerency141A selection of 1917 headlines drawn from The SeattleStar and The Post-Intelligencer on events related tomilitary conscription and avoiding it.

142 Part FourSomewhat more restrained than theSeattle Times’ same day reporting on theRussian ship Shilka, The Post-Intelligencernonetheless could not let go of theopportunity for composing a sensationalistbanner headline for its 24 December, 1917Monday morning issue.priority was restoring Seattle’srespectability so that the banwould be lifted.Moving quickly, the newchief uncovered a “booze plot”in which members of the DrySquad were caught wholesalingthe vast stores of whiskey thatthey had been collecting on theirraids. Sergeant George Comstock and ten other officers were arrested. (Comstock willreappear in the mid-1920s under similar circumstances.) Restored to respectability by thisbold stroke, Seattle earned General Greene’s absolution. The ban was lifted on 8 January.Radicals, alleged and real, would get Chief Warren’s foremost attention in the future. Gillsurvived impeachment petitions, but in January he was disbarred from legal practice forone year, accused by the State Board of Examiners of unethically soliciting law business.When he ran for one last time in the February primaries, he finished a poor third, behind theextremely opportunistic Ole Hanson and the Progressive James Bradford. Hanson received23,241 votes, Bradford 11,738, and Gill 8,121.In the runoff, both Hanson and Bradford campaigned for municipal ownership.But Hanson unfurled the flag, adopted the stance of a superpatriot and an antiradical, andused a well-worn letter from one of the unions lauding his reform leadership in the state’s1911 legislative session. He drew the support of the Washington State Federation of Laborand the Times, P-I, and Town Crier. Bradford ran on respect for civil liberties, earningthe support of the Argus, which declared him “superior,” and of the Union Record, theCentral Labor Council, and Mayor Gill. Hanson won with 32,202 votes; Bradford received27,683.The class polarization in the city that had been touched off by the jingoistic PotlatchRiot was apparent in this election. The 1915 “businessmen’s legislature” demonstratedthis polarization dramatically, as did the reversal of its key legislation by referendum inthe 1916 general election. The open shop movement, mounted to combat unionization,contributed decisively to the polarization. The chamber of commerce had formally declaredfor the open shop in 1914. The open shoppers insisted on employers’ absolute authorityin the workplace and bullied those employers who conceded the right of their employeesto bargain collectively. Unions, on the other hand, tended by their very nature to broadencitizen participation in the political process, as did other formerly excluded groups, mostnotably women. To be politically effective, unions and women’s groups sought allianceswith other organizations: the Municipal League, Ministerial Federation, the CommercialClub, and the Grange chief among them.

War Time: Preparedness to Belligerency143The year 1918 opened auspiciously. The Central Labor Council applauded theRussian Revolution, thereby splitting from its own state leadership and alienating most ofits remaining middle-class supporters. The following day, 6 January, twenty men dressedas sailors and two dressed in civilian garb wrecked the Linotype and other machines atthe Piggott Printing Plant, where both the Union Record and the Seattle Daily Call wereproduced. The costumed men forced six workers at gunpoint to lie face down on the floor.Police response was dilatory, but the workers identified the two leaders, and authorities werecajoled into arresting the two men: G. Murl Gordon, an Employers’ Association operative,and G. Fred Drake, a veteran strikebreaker. It turned out that the chamber of commercehad hired them. Farcically, both men pleaded innocence by reason of insanity and mentalTwo weeks after Mayor Hiram Gill appointed JoelWarren as his new police chief, The Post-Intelligencercould report on 16 December, 1917 “WARREN STARTSCLEANUP.” The news story’s opening paragraphs read“Two hundred men, arrested on suspicion of being slackers, undesirables, I.W.W. ‘panhandlers’ and disorderlypersons generally, were gathered in by Chief of Police Warren and a special detail of detectives and patrolmenlast night. They were booked on open charges and no bail was accepted . . . Pool rooms and other loafing placesin the south end frequented by the class of men arrested were designated by Chief Warren as the objective of theraiding parties. The work was thorough and systematic, and none was allowed to leave the police station unlesshe could prove two things: First, that he had visible means of support, and, second that if of draft age he hadregistered . . . The wholesale arrests mark Chief Warren’s first move to clean up the city with a view to convincingthe war department that Seattle is safe for soldiers to visit.”Three days later, on 19 December, the P-I reported that Warren’s round-up was having the intended effect for themilitary’s off-limits order “may be lifted.” Soon, however, a “booze ring” was uncovered in Warren’s own drysquad and the arrested officers included the head of the squad, Sergeant George H. Comstock. In the montage ofprincipal characters in the “booze scandal” Comstock is upper-right with the hat. Near the top Mayor Gill poseswith his new chief for the press soon after Warren was appointed on 1 December, 1917. At 6’4” the trim fifty-eightyear-old Joel F. Warren, (He preferred to be called Joseph.) makes Hiram Gill look hayseed. Warren got his startwith law enforcement in the 1880s as Spokane’s first patrolman. Subsequently he was made chief there and lateralso in Nome, Alaska during the gold rush. Gill, by the time of the appointment a fading mayor, gave the new chief“unfettered control of the department.”

144 Part Fourirresponsibility and were acquitted. When the Seattle Daily Call ceased publication soonafterward, one member of its staff, Anna Louise Strong, joined the Union Record as afeature writer. She would become famous for the thunderous editorial she would writeduring the 1919 General Strike.Two 1917 strikes continued into 1918: the Candy and Cracker Workers Unionand the Butchers Union strikes. The former union settled its strike and could boast ofnew unionized candy shops that employed former strikers. The butchers had a toughertime of it. In early December 1917, seven hundred packinghouse workers struck theFrye, Carstens, and Bartons plants. When the Master Butchers Association allied with thepackers, the strike became a lockout. Events in Tacoma followed a similar course. TheUnion Record reported that Frye had imported twenty-two Chinese and one hundred blacksas strikebreakers, housing them at the plant. However, dozens of blacks were reportedlyleaving the plant, and the union was offering to accept them as members.When concurrent strikes in Chicago, Kansas City, and Omaha were resolved, theunion offered to settle in Seattle on the same terms, but the local companies stubbornlyrefused. In May the union admitted defeat, but not before it had built its own cooperativepacking plant and formed the Cooperative Food Products Association. Earlier, laundryworkers had defied the Laundry Owners Club and formed Mutual Laundry, the first unioncooperative in Seattle, which operated until 1932, when it was undermined by the TeamstersUnion.Meanwhile, unrest was brewing on the waterfront. Since the bitter 1916longshoremen’s strike, the Waterfront Employers’ Union (WEU) had controlled wagescales and working conditions for longshoremen on the West Coast. It also controlled thehiring halls, from which workers were dispatched for either deepwater or coastwise jobs.Pay scales were pegged higher for the former. The U.S. Shipping Board purchased and builtmerchant ships to meet the growing demand. To prevent work stoppages, in August 1917it created the National Adjustment Commission (NAC), which in turn established regionaladjustment boards, each composed of one shipping company executive, one member of theInternational Longshoremen’s Association, and one government representative.The Post-Intelligencer’s front-pagecoverage for Sunday 6 Jan, 1918 of thearmed destruction of the Piggott PrintingPlant. The lead paragraph reads in part,“Led by two civilians, one of whombrandished a 45-caliber automatic pistol,between fifteen and twenty Americansailors in uniform wrecked the shop ofthe H.C. Pigott Printing Concern, Inc, 83Pike street, at 9 o’clock last night . . . Thereason for the attack is believed to be thefact that the Seattle Daily Call, a radicalSocialist newspaper, and the IndustrialWorker, a weekly organ of the I.W.W. areprinted in the Pigott shop. Through theoversight of the raiding party, however,the Call escaped unscathed. The presson which the Call is printed [is] in a roomon the floor below the wrecked shop.”

War Time: Preparedness to Belligerency145When the National Adjustment Commission tried to assume control of Seattle’shiring halls in September, the Waterfront Employers’ Union refused to work with theILA representative. On 22 October the International Longshoremen’s Association askedthe WEU for the eight-hour workday and a pay raise. In addition, it asked that the WEUrelinquish its control of the hiring hall. The WEU refused to even discuss the matter becauseit had no contract with the ILA. The ILA filed an appeal with the National AdjustmentCommission. The NAC initially sided with the WEU, but when the American Federationof Labor president Samuel Gompers objected and threatened to appeal to President Wilson,the NAC reversed itself, prohibiting the WEU from continuing to use its blacklistingsystem and closing the WEU’s hiring halls effective 1 July 1918. Henceforth all waterfrontworkers would be hired at the dock gates, and wages would be settled once Carleton Parkerhad completed his cost-of-living survey for the Washington State Defense Council. TheWEU immediately appealed the closure of its hiring halls.A postscript: recruitment of union members quickly got under way. Rivalrybetween the Northwest Stevedores and Truckers Association (which had been instrumentalin breaking the 1916 strike) and the ILA was lessened somewhat when Local 38-12agreed to accept eighty-five blacks and Hispanics from the Northwest Stevedores intoits membership. All of these new members worked at Pier 89. By the end of 1918, thelocal’s membership had reached 3,500, its highest count ever. The Northwest Stevedoresmaintained its friendly relations with the WEU and its rivalry with the ILA into December1918, when it disbanded. On 14 January 1919, the WEU and ILA signed a closed shopagreement covering all Puget Sound ports. The General Strike in February left the newagreement in shambles. But before we move on to the shipyard strike and its consequences,let us explore the general fate of civil liberties.The Justice Department sent Clarence Reames from Oregon to Seattle on 9 February1918 to organize the prosecution of the Wobblies and the others who had been rounded up inSeptember and November 1917. Largely because of the exuberance with which the MinuteMen pursued suspicious characters, Seattle’s jails could hold no more. What constituted“Look for the Circle W” was the standard advertising line for the wholesale meat packers Barton and Company.Joined with other big packers, Carstens ran frequent “Wanted” calls for “Loyal American” workers in the localdailies. The accompanying example appeared in the P-I for 7 December, 1917.”

146 Part Foursedition and espionage in the eyes of the MinuteMen is indicated by a partial list of the cases forthe period from May to November 1918: 399alien enemies; 1,114 passport violators; 707people named in loyalty reports; 677 disloyalcitizens; 938 Liberty bond and Red Crossslackers; 1,198 IWW agents; 990 pro-Germanradicals; 451 alleged spies or German agents;and 449 people making seditious utterances.Altogether, there were 10,042 cases, and thepolice made 1,008 arrests. Reames found manyunindictable, although he did prosecute when hebelieved he had the slightest chance of gainingconviction. However, he began restraining theMinute Men from coming directly to his officeunless they had evidence that would stand up incourt.The legitimacy that the local constabularyand government officials gave to paramilitaryorganizations such as the Minute Men foretoldClarence ReamesCourtesy, Museum of History and Industry,Webster and Stevens Collectionthe domestic repression of civil liberties. The members of the group were given increasinglatitude to operate as deputies of the city’s law enforcement agencies. By the time theMinute Men affiliated with the American Protective League (APL) in June 1918, itsmembership numbered about twelve thousand. The APL was the brainchild of the Chicagoadvertising executive Albert Briggs. In February 1917 he had offered to provide manpowerand automobiles to help the Chicago office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)deal with its growing backlog of citizens’ reports of people suspected of spying or beingdisloyal. The offer was eagerly accepted by A. Bruce Bielaski, the director of the FBI.Bielaski also increased his field staff from three hundred to four hundred agents andrequested help from local officials. Heartened by this surge of federal initiative, Briggsproposed a national network of volunteers to work under the Justice Department. Bielaskicalled Briggs to Washington andgave him the go-ahead, and so theAmerican Protective League wasformed.Citizen John R. Robertson received this“token of Merit for services rendered theGovernment of the United States” on 1Jan, 1919 for whatever part he played withthe Minute Men Division of the AmericanProjective League. The certificate alsonotes that the APL was “organized with theapproval and operating under the directionof the United State Department of Justice,Bureau of Investigation.”

War Time: Preparedness to Belligerency147Cities with large alien populations were primary targets. In Chicago, Samuel Insull,the utility magnate, donated office space. Recruits were drawn primarily from Briggs’scontacts in the business communities in the major cities, presumably because they couldbe trusted. Nascent local organizations often already existed. Briggs wanted to bring theselocal vigilante groups into the APL. Such affiliations grew apace as state and local vigilanteorganizations continued to spring up. Industrial employers and their surrogates dominatedthe APL’s administration, just as they did the administration of Seattle’s Minute Men.Employees were recruited as informers but played no influential role beyond that. Once thespy scare petered out after the first few months of the war—neither an invasion from Mexiconor a bombardment of coastal cities had occurred—genuine spies and saboteurs provedhard to come by. Seeking an alternative patriotic role, the APL turned upon draft resistersand opponents of the war in general. In Seattle the APL found experienced vigilantes in theMinute Men. The immigration service commissioner Henry White thanked the membersof the Minute Men for their help, commenting that their victims were “all bad men, as youknow.”The Labor Department added to Reames’s caseload when it issued the followingorder on 2 March: “[A]lien disturbers in the Pacific Northwest . . . whether I.W.W.s or not. . . should be confined for deportation.” The Times reported, “[C]ivic organizations andemployers urged the establishment of a detention camp at Puget Sound to accommodate3,000 men.”By the summer of 1918, the Wobblies had been driven out of the woods by thecombined efforts of the Spruce ProductionDivision, the 4 Ls, and federal and localauthorities. The IWW practically ceasedto exist as an organization after this time.The civil liberties historian Albert Gunnsconcludes in Civil Liberties in Crisis thatit was probably safer to be a Germanagent than a Wobbly. But many driftedto the cities where they found unskilledjobs, mostly in the shipyards and on thewaterfront, which were already sourcesof radicalism. Reames’s enthusiasticpursuit of his mission drew fire fromthe Central Labor Council, which urgedPresident Wilson to discharge him.The council’s action embarrassed theWashington State Federation of Laborpresident William Short, who termed theplea “nonsensical.”The Central LaborCouncil steadily became more militantas it responded to these repressive actionsand the rise of government-authorizedCourtesy UW Libraries, Special CollectionsKate Sadler, popular soapbox Socialist orator fromSeattle.

148 Part Fourvigilantism. Throughout 1917 mass meetings were held, often to protest Tom Mooney’sdeath sentence. (Mooney had been convicted for a bombing in a San Francisco warprepardness parade 22 July 1916.) Even the conservative Washington State Federationof Labor leadership believed Mooney had been framed by the San Francisco Employers’Association and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Much of organized labor wouldfeel threatened if he was convicted. A ten-block-longparade was held in February, followed the next week byan overflowing mass benefit organized by the Card andLabel League. In early August a crowd of four thousandgathered at the arena to hear the popular socialist KateSadler and other protesters. Under the auspices of theRussian Workers’ Council of Seattle, a meeting washeld at the Moore Theater in mid-August to expresssympathy for the Russian Revolution and to opposeAmerican intervention in Russia. After her release fromprison, Tom Mooney’s wife, Rena, was featured at onefall meeting. After the armistice ending World War Iwas signed, the Central Labor Council requested thatthe governor of California, William Stephens, pardonMooney. The governor did end up changing Mooney’ssentence from death to life imprisonment. The Mooneycase brought organized labor together as nothing elsehad.Individuals were also targeted for prosecution.Habitual dissenter Hulet Wells, now a member of theNo Conscription League, became the first in Seattle tolose his civil rights. He was arrested before the SelectiveService Act was passed for taking a copy of an anticonscriptionleaflet to the printer. Sam Sadler and twoother socialists—the Pass brothers—were arrested on 28May 1917 for their part in mailing the leaflets. GeorgeVanderveer defended all four. The jury was split, sevento five, but the district attorney announced that Wellsand Sadler would be reindicted. Their retrial was setfor February 1918. Vanderveer was unable to defendthe men because he had to be in Chicago to preparethe defense for those rounded up in the nationwidesweeps of September and November 1917. Deprivedof Vanderveer’s skills, the men were convicted andsentenced to two years imprisonment at McNeil Island,though they remained out of prison on appeal until early1919. Wells would figure prominently in the GeneralStrike.The pacifist Louise Olivereau, a typist in the“Guilty of Conspiracy” LouiseOlivereau as depicted on the frontpage of the 1 December, 1917 Post-Intelligencer for its report of herbeing found guilty of distributingantiwar literature. The court reporterdescribed her as “a sturdy figure,foreign in appearance. She said in herargument yesterday that her parentswere born in France. She is tall andheavy, with a mass of dark brownhair, plainly arranged, and she wearsthick spectacles. She wore yesterdaya loose belted dark brown dress, withwhite sailor collar, fastened in thefront with a dull gold pin, and whitecuffs. She thrusts her head forwardwhen she walks, and when she talksshe says ‘conscientious objector’through her teeth. She has manyfriends . . .”

Shipyard Strike: “Thunder on the Left”149IWW office, requested that the Justice Department return some anticonscription pamphletsthat its agents had seized in one of their raids. She was arrested instead and indicted onnine counts covered by the Espionage Act of 15 June 1917. In the company of Anna LouiseStrong, she eloquently conducted her own defense but was nevertheless convicted on 30November 1917 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment at Cañon City, Colorado. (Shewas released in March 1920.)It was Anna Louise Strong’s sympathetic presence at both of these trials thatinspired the movement to recall her from the school board in March 1918. The MinuteMen played the key role in mounting the petition drive that put the recall on the ballot.The pacifism of her father, the Reverend Sydney Dix Strong, led him into trouble as well.Though he was a founder of the Municipal League, the league succumbed to the warhysteria. The P-I reported that the senior Strong had been arrested in Los Angeles whileparticipating in the Conference of Christian Pacifists. Because of this misinformation, twoleaguers petitioned for his ouster. Ignoring its own due process requirements and refusingto investigate further, the league voted 73 to 20 for his removal. It was not long after thisthat two other founders, the port commissioner Robert Bridges and the city councilmanWarren D. Lane, were ousted for their membership in the Non-Partisan League.Shipyard Strike: “Thunder on the Left”Since the creation of the Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC), in September1917, four new yards for the construction of steel ships, along with a number of facilitiesspecializing in the construction of wooden ships, were built in Seattle. The latter provided aneeded stimulus for a sagging lumber market. Seattle yards ultimately built twenty-six and ahalf percent of the ships contracted for by the EFC. The workforce in these facilities was inthe neighborhood of thirty-five thousand. To recruit personnel, some companies, includingSkinner and Eddy (the largest operation), offered higher wages than the competition. TheEFC frowned upon this practice because it siphoned off skilled workers from elsewhere.Seattle yards set production records, partly by paying higher wages.Near the end of 1917, government agents were scouring the country for fifteenthousand skilled mechanics. With characteristic hyperbole, Thomas Burke boasted, “PugetSound will be the location of the greatest shipbuilding industry the world has ever seen.”In anticipation, the chamber of commerce appointed the architect Charles Bebb to headup a housing committee to plan accommodations. The chamber acted none too soon, forthe shipyard workers threatened a strike because of the exorbitant rents and the dubioussurcharges landlords exacted from them. The Metal Trades Council (MTC) appealed tothe U.S. Shipping Board and to local and state authorities for a pay raise. Upon receivingCarleton Parker’s cost-of-living survey, which indicated only an eight and a half percentincrease since 1 October 1917 (including a ten percent increase in rent), the board refusedto allow a pay raise.To deal with disparities in wages and working conditions, the EFC established theShipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board (SLAB), also known as the Macy Board because ofits chairman, V. Everit Macy. Seattle unions felt justified in seeking higher pay to adjust to

150 Part Fourthe higher cost of living in the West. However,Charles Piez, head of the EFC, insisted onuniform wages regardless of regional differencesin the cost of living. The Metal Trades Councilrequested a pay scale based on six dollars pereight-hour day for skilled workers; Skinnerand Eddy and another shipyard, Meachamand Babcock, agreed, but the other yards didnot. SLAB refused the pay raise. A strike waspostponed when Edward Hurley, president of theU.S. Shipping Board, invited the MTC to sendthree delegates to Washington to talk mattersover.Because of the chronic jurisdictionalsquabbles within the U.S. Shipping Board, thedelegates found no one in authority to whom theycould address their complaints. They returnedhome empty-handed on 23 September 1918. Bythen the West Coast shipyards had gone on strike.The Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board sentRev. Sydney Strong D.D.,father of Anna Louise Strongmembers to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco to conduct hearings. Upon completion ofits hearings, the board offered a basic rate of $5.25 for skilled workers except in Seattle,where it conceded a rate of $5.50. The Metal Trades Council objected because the offerwas based on the 1916 scale, which was unfair to semiskilled and unskilled workers,who had not been organized at that time. Consequently, their pay was disproportionatelylower. The MTC therefore appealed to the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board and sentits president, James A. Taylor, to Washington to argue its case. The members of SLABdeadlocked, resulting in rejection of the appeal. Over the objections of the unions, theMTC ordered the boilermakers, shipbuilders, and painters back to work in late October.The bitterness felt by the shipyard workers, combined with their sense of betrayal, lit thefuse for another strike in January 1919, which in turn ignited sentiment for a general strikein the following weeks.This aborted shipyard strike ended a mere two weeks before the armistice wassigned, at a time when the city was facing a global influenza epidemic and was in a heateddebate over the city’s prospective purchase of PSTP&L’s traction operation. But let us turnfirst to the city’s acquisition of the Skagit River power site.The City Light superintendent J. D. Ross believed that cheap electrical powerwould be the crucial logistical factor for those deciding where to locate their industrial orcommercial operation. Many industrial leaders and engineers believed that the importanceof cheap electrical power in these decisions was overblown. Despite having suchreservations, the chamber of commerce—which was normally allied with Puget SoundTraction, Power and Light—decided to consider additional power sources, even thoseoffered by a municipally owned utility, to counteract Seattle’s chronic power shortage.Ross’s ambition to create a market for electrical power contrasted with PSTP&L’s policy of

Shipyard Strike: “Thunder on the Left”151waiting for the market to generate itself. Ross, for example, had excitedly told Mayor Gillabout the new electrolytic smelting process, exclaiming that City Light “can get ore fromMinnesota for steel and reduction furnaces that will supply ship building.” Seattle might atlast get its longed-for industrial base and win the chamber’s support in the effort.Puget Sound Traction, Power and Light’s strategy of filing claims on every potentialwaterpower site available ran counter to the aggressive industrial development policy thatRoss pushed so hard for. If PSTP&L succeeded in blocking out City Light, the kind ofgrowth sought by Ross would be stifled. The company unfolded its strategy by filing aclaim on the Skagit River site in 1913 through its subsidiary, the Skagit Power Company.In 1917 the company also purchased claims at Sunset Falls on the Skykomish River andthe Hebb property on the White River. It filed a squatter’s claim to the Cushman site onthe Skokomish River as well. By taking these measures, the company was closing offprospective sites to City Light. But Ross, learning that no development work had been doneon the Skagit site, contested the company’s permit. The U.S. Forest Service had previouslyextended the permit, but it was now up for renewal.Ross wrote to the Northwest District Forester, George Cecil, that PSTP&L hadblocked City Light from acquiring other prospective power sources and that it would beunable to meet the growing demand for power unless it had the site on the Skagit. Rossoptimistically contended that 25,000 kilowatts could be generated in eighteen months,thereby lowering the demand for fuel oil. The U.S. Fuel Administration had been urginghim to conserve fuel oil—the war was expected to last until 1920. On 22 December 1917 theSecretary of Agriculture, David Houston, revoked the Skagit Power Company’s permit.On 18 January 1918, Houston gave City Light the right to call for bids for atemporary wooden crib dam on the lower Skagit;he also gave it until 15 May to file a developmentplan. At its 29 January meeting, the Board of PublicWorks approved a bond issue, but constructioncompanies refused to accept the bonds unless theCapital Issues Sub-Committee of the Federal TradeCommission approved them. Further complicatingthe matter was the need for the city council to declareits intent to develop the Skagit site. Its decisiondepended upon councilman Oliver Erickson. Heforced Ross to agree to continue clay puddling atthe Cedar River dam as a condition of his support.Ross conceded and won the council’s unanimousapproval. Ross next had to persuade the federalCapital Issues Sub-Committee.Edward Nash Hurley, President Woodrow Wilson’s choice tochair both the U.S. Shipping Board and the Emergency FleetCorporation. On the subject of building ships, Hurley trumpetedin The Post-Intelligencer 22 December, 1917, “Seattle leads theworld.”

152The 1918 global flu pandemictook twice as many lives as theGreat War. Seattle’s first deathto the flu on Oct. 5, 1918 wasa young man at the Universityof Washington’s naval trainingstation. His loss could be countedin the grim ledgers of both the warand the epidemic. Three days laterSeattle Mayor Ole Hanson forbadevery form of public assemblage.Dances on Saturday, church onSunday, school on Monday – allwere closed. Citizens were soonordered to wear masks, and boththis order and the ban on publicmeetings were not lifted until Nov.11, Armistice Day. That afternoonand evening the streets of Seattlewere filled with unmasked revelerscelebrating the double victoryover death by war and death bydisease. Here on 3rd Avenue in theblock south of Washington Street,employees of Steward and HolmesDrugs stage an unmasking forphotographer Max Loudon.Courtesy of Grace McAdams.Two letters from PSTP&L, one from A. W. Leonard and the other from its vicepresident, William H. McGrath, were stopping the sub-committee from acting on CityLight’s request for approval of the bond issue. Leonard argued that City Light was trying totake business from his company without increasing the power supply. McGrath suggestedan intertie between the two utilities’ systems for the duration of the war. The Capital IssuesSub-Committee chairman, John Perrin, asked Ross and Mayor Hanson to confirm the city’spower needs. Concurrently, the Times, P-I, and Town Crier began sharply criticizing theSkagit project. A majority of the city’s bankers and the Building Owners and ManagersAssociation also opposed the project. Siding with City Light were the Star, Union Record,and Municipal League, as well as David Skinner, whose shipyards were served by CityLight. Skinner dragged approval out of the chamber of commerce.When the subcommittee recommended on 1 June that the two competitors intertietheir systems and that City Light postpone work on the Skagit, Ross submitted a newproposal for $500,000 to build a substation to handle Skagit power once it was generated.Perrin then asked a Seattle banker, Manson F. Backus, to find an “independent” source whocould provide more information. Backus’s choice was none other than William McGrath,PSTP&L’s vice president. Realizing that McGrath’s opinion might be biased, Perrin senta consulting engineer from his staff, S. W. Taylor, directly to Leonard to learn how much

Shipyard Strike: “Thunder on the Left”153surplus energy PSTP&L had and to discuss the intertie. Ross, suspecting this would happen,hired a consulting engineer from San Francisco. When Perrin received both reports, hedecided to postpone action on City Light’s bond proposal.The next in line, the War Department, came down hard on the city, threatening toseize its plant unless it agreed to interconnect with PSTP&L. Mayor Hanson urged SenatorWesley Jones to submit a resolution to impound the subcommittee’s records. On 13 Julythe U.S. Senate passed the resolution. A second hearing was then granted for 1 August todecide the matter solely on the basis of the region’s power needs. When PSTP&L offered tomeet these needs with a dam at Sunset Falls, the city councilman R. H. Thomson counteredthat only the Skagit could provide the capacity required. The subcommittee agreed withThomson and approved the bond issue. By the time City Light could begin construction,the war had ended, and the subcommittee’s qualifying stipulations became moot. The fallsnows prevented any surveying of the site until spring 1919. By then the General Strikewould be history, and the city would have consummated its deal for PSTP&L’s tractionsystem.While events moved toward a showdown between the shipyard workers and theShipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board, Stone and Webster was preparing, without sentiment,to part with its decrepit transit lines. Nationwide, street railways were no longer profitable,having peaked as an investment in about 1915. Furthermore, little capital was being routedto their maintenance. PSTP&L owed the city about $400,000 for nonpayment of taxes onits 1916 and 1917 gross revenues. Its franchise limited fares to five cents, and the farescollected at each transfer point did not compensate the company adequately. The companywas also waiting for the state supreme court to decide whether its franchise required it topave between its tracks. Finally, the city was suing it for not paying its prorated share foruse of the Fremont Bridge.Scene from the Armistice Day celebrations that spread spontaneously throughout the city.

154 Part FourCourtesy, Seattle UtilitiesThe sturdy granite Skagit River Canyon at Diablo recorded for a City Light survey that was prelude to theconstruction of three dams on the Skagit, the second of which, the Diablo Dam, was built here.As for the city, it owned three street railway lines, all operating at a loss. One ranalong Railroad Avenue on a trestle to West Spokane Street and then hooked up with a lineto Burien. The city’s third and oldest line (built in 1914), the Division A, ran along DexterAvenue and then on to Ballard. Unlike PSTP&L’s lines, the city’s were well constructed.As a temporary measure, Mayor Gill persuaded the U.S. Shipping Board to subsidize asteam railroad to run eight and a half miles along the Great Northern’s tracks to connectwith a new line along Railroad Avenue. The city also requested that the board take over itsstreet railways for the duration of the war; the board refused.At a meeting with Mayor Hanson and the city council on 14 May 1918, A. W.Leonard proposed suspension of PSTP&L’s franchise obligations and a fare increase. Yetthe company resisted offering better service in exchange for such concessions. CouncilmanThomson suggested that the city purchase the company’s lines outright, and Leonard askedfor an offer in writing. On the surface, it appeared that the city did not make an offer forthe lines at this time. Someone would later testify, however, that Hanson did make a secret

Shipyard Strike: “Thunder on the Left”155offer for $15 million in July. To head off a threatened strike by the trainmen, Hanson askedLeonard on 6 July to raise the pay of his trainmen to that of the city’s trainmen, but Leonardrefused. Negotiations were at an impasse.Enter the U.S. Shipping Board’s Emergency Fleet Corporation. The EFC insistedthat a solution had to be found for transporting shipyard workers more effectively andsent A. Merritt Taylor, the head of its Passenger Transportation and Housing Division, toSeattle. Taylor himself was a traction owner from Philadelphia. On 6 September he metwith PSTP&L representatives, the city council, and the mayor at the New WashingtonHotel. Hanson offered to lease the lines from PSTP&L but coupled the proposal with anoption to buy in the future. Councilman Lane objected to the lease proposal if purchase wasthe intended outcome. Taylor threatened to terminate the EFC’s contracts if no resolutionwas forthcoming. Leonard then asked the city to buy the lines for $18 million. Hansonquickly countered, offering $15 million, the same figure he was alleged to have offeredsecretly in July. Leonard reported Hanson’s offer to the company’s Boston headquarters,which accepted it without delay. No reference was made as to what property was to beincluded in the deal, nor was the source of Hanson’s figure revealed. Now the city councilhad to approve or reject the deal.Councilman Erickson led the opposition to the purchase. He was the only councilmember able to speak over the barrage of newspaper articles that pushed hard for acceptance.The Times granted him space in its 22 October issue. Erickson contended that “as near ascan be computed one-third of all the property in the county is what we are buying and itshould, according to the foregoing be worth about $5,562,000.” He argued that Stone andWebster, after thoroughly frustrating the public with its poor service and oppressive laborpolicies, had allowed the property to deteriorate with the intention of selling it to the citylater at an inflated price. Harry Chadwick cautioned his Argus readers that both Hanson’sprice and the $11.7 million that the P-I thought was appropriate were too high. A suspiciousThe Everett Interurban crosses the Fremont Bridge on 6 June, 1917, or soon after the bridge opened to traffic. Atthe time the city and the PSTP&L were in litigation over the latter’s reluctance to pay its share in the dismantlingof the Stone Way Bridge that had taken the place of the Fremont Bridge between 1912 and 1917 during theconstruction of both the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the new bascule bridge at Fremont. It would become—or it was claimed to be by city engineers—the “busiest bascule bridge in the world.”

156 Part FourChadwick snapped that Hanson might use the new system to build his political machine andmight appoint his sidekick, Thomas Murphine, superintendent of the system—an accurateprediction.The P-I conceded that the city would be undertaking its biggest job ever but thatthe price was fair, even “cheap.” The Star, while advocating purchase, made the mostprofound observation in its 2 November headline: “Car Line Will Be Paid For, Not Out OfTaxes, But Out Of Passenger Fares.” Whether bond and interest payments were to comefrom the city’s general fund or only from streetcar revenues did become the vital issue inthe years ahead.After bitter debate the council provisionally approved the purchase, wanting toplace it before the voters as an advisory ballot measure in the 5 November election. (Thearmistice would be only six days after the election.) The Times devoted a substantial portionof its Sunday edition to the purchase, pumping up the putative value to $16,102,946. Themeasure was approved by a ratio of 3.5 to 1.In Boston, Henry Bradlee, vice president of Stone and Webster, effusivelycongratulated Frederick W. Pratt, PSTP&L’s president. Bradlee, having become discouragedabout the street railway business, commented that it was hard for the company’s board ofdirectors “to understand how such a trade could possibly have been put through under thecircumstances.” In the same letter, he wrote, “You are doing some stunt, and if it can befinally put through . . . it will be a bully good trade for the Company . . . [if] we could besure to make it stick and could obtain bonds or other security from the City, which wouldbe satisfactory to the bankers. A bond which is a first lien on the gross earnings, whichhas the taxing power of the City indirectly behind it to make up the deficits in operatingexpenses certainly ought to be good enough to satisfy the bankers.” The state supremecourt had yet to rule on this very point—the legality of the bonds being a first lien on thegeneral fund.Suspicions of fraud and bribery were rampant in Seattle at this time, which wasunderstandable, considering thelevels of corruption that hadbeen revealed thus far. Thisatmosphere of suspicion wouldprevail in Seattle throughout the1920s and would reach its climaxin 1931, when the mayor, FrankEdwards, fired J. D. Ross; Stoneand Webster replaced A. W.Leonard; and the voters recalledEdwards.Ole Hanson in 1911 when the future Seattlemayor was still in the state legislature andselling real estate—as parodied in TheCartoon, A Reference Book of Seattle’sSuccessful Men.

Shipyard Strike: “Thunder on the Left”157An affidavit of Emil V. Minich, the formerhead of PSTP&L’s Secret Service Department,notarized on 21 November 1923 fills in someinformation that is lacking in the newspapercoverage of mid-October 1924. Minich explainedin the affidavit that he had worked closely in1918 with a man named Robert Whiting to putthe jitney drivers out of business and to destroytheir union. Whiting joined the union whileon the PSTP&L’s payroll, even becoming theunion’s business agent and a member of theCentral Labor Council. He struck up a friendshipwith the Central Labor Council members RobertHesketh and Thomas Bolton, who were alsoon the city council. The council was obligatedto decide on an ordinance consummating therailway purchase by 1 April 1919. After Whitingsucceeded in breaking the jitney drivers union,he began working directly with A. W. Leonard,Argus Editor, Harry Chadwickwho ordered him to concentrate on the citycouncilman Cecil Fitzgerald as well as on Boltonand Hesketh. Bolton, being hard up, began living in Whiting’s house, and they shared asafe-deposit box at Seattle National Bank. Whiting also co-owned a yacht with Fitzgerald.Minich alleged that Leonard instructedWhiting to have the bank transfer onethousand dollars to Bolton’s account.Bolton and Hesketh were notthe only frequent visitors to Whiting’soffice during this period. So too wasThomas Murphine, who would be namedsuperintendent of the Municipal StreetTwenty-nine boxes holding approximately 1,000pounds of bonds guaranteeing the city’s $15,000,000debt to Puget Sound Traction, Light and PowerCompany (thereafter minus the “traction”) awaitthe PSTP&L van’s at the back door to the City-Country building on April Fool’s Day, 1919. TheStar’s own caption reads, “Thomas Nelson Perkins,representative of the Eastern financiers, who heldmortgages for $28,000,000 against the Puget SoundTraction, Light & Power Co., is seen here packingthe last bundle of the $15,000,000 Seattle publicutility bonds for shipment to Boston. As soon as thestreet railway system was paid for by the city, withthese bonds, they were turned over to Perkins by thecompany.”

158 Part FourCourtesy, Webster & Stevens Collection, Museum of History and IndustryUsing the “theatre” of a wooden ship’s hull under construction, Seattle shipyard workers get a wartime pep talkfrom Thomas Barker of the US Department of Labor.Railway by Hanson, just as Chadwick had suspected before the advisory vote of November.When Murphine was in the legislature in 1911, he was known to be friendly to PSTP&L. Itwas he who allegedly communicated the $15 million figure from Leonard to Hanson—theamount that Hanson had in turn offered the company at the September 1918 meeting. SoonPSTP&L would use the payment of the bond debt for the purchase of the street railway toobstruct City Light’s Skagit project. And the threatened shipyard strike would become areality in January, leading directly to the General Strike.

Part FiveThe 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike159The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strikeand Its AftermathAfter the Emergency Fleet Corporation’s Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Boardrejected the Metal Trades Council’s appeal of the basic wage scale of $5.50, the MTC’sJames Taylor got an ambiguous promise from Charles Piez, the head of the EFC: localnegotiators could bypass the EFC as long as employers did not increase the EFC’sfinancial obligations. Piez later confirmed this in writing, though considerable ambiguityOn 17 January, 1919, five days before shipyard strike began, the Seattle Star felt confidentenough to predict it. A banner across the top of Star first page also notes the early plans fora nationwide Mooney strike for Independence Day. The attached photo at the bottom is theclassic of striking workers at the Skinner and Eddy yard. The 35,000 men in the other yardssoon followed them.

160 Part Fiveremained: if the employers agreed to a wage increase, how would the MTC know whatthe employers were going to charge the EFC? Much hinged on how the MTC chose tointerpret Piez’s statement, as well as on Piez’s own view of the matter and, not least, histrustworthiness.In any case, when the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board, or Macy Board,announced its award in early November 1918, the Union Record ran the headline “MacyAward Cuts Seattle Wages.” A strike vote was taken in late November. On 10 Decemberthe votes were tallied; the laborers had authorized a strike if the Metal Trades Council’sdemands were again rejected.Fearful of where the strike vote might lead, William Short, president of theWashington State Federation of Labor, warned Samuel Gompers on 29 November that theCentral Labor Council “has gone Bolsheviki mad since the Armistice . . . and is temporarilyunder control of the I.W.W. . . . They are determined to have a general strike, if not over‘Mooney’, then they will attempt it over something else.” He continued, “[S]ince the‘Mooney’ agitation has started they attend the meetings in droves [overawing] the moretimid delegates.”Negotiations began anew on 16 January 1919. David Skinner, who claimed torepresent the employers, offered a wage increase that would divide the workers if accepted:only the mechanics would get an increase (to 86.5 cents an hour, or $6.92 per day). But whodid Skinner really represent? According to the historian Robert Friedheim, Piez’s agentsalleged that Skinner wanted to corner the labor market for his own yard by offering higherwages in case there was a severe cutback in shipbuilding. And in the process, he earned thedistrust and hostility of other shipbuilders. In addition, Piez believed that the wage disputewas being used as a cover for the IWW extremists’ more radical objectives. And CentralLabor Council leaders were convinced that the employers were planning an open shopdrive.Piez then covertly entered the negotiations. By telegraph Piez admonished the MetalTrades Association’s members to resist the Metal Trades Council’s demands, warning thatsteel allotments would be curtailed if they accepted them. (After the armistice, contractshad been canceled for ships on which construction had not started, and seventy-three shipswere awaiting completion.) But the telegram was delivered to the wrong party—the MetalTrades Council. Piez’s duplicity was exposed. Expectations of an open shop drive couldonly be heightened under these circumstances.Because of Piez’s provocation, a shipyard strike seemed inevitable unless Piezand the owners would concede to the MTC and openly declare that no open shop drivewas imminent. Strike notices were distributed on 18 January, and the strike began on thetwenty-first. The MTC began to prepare for a long strike, working with the Central LaborCouncil to feed and care for strikers and their families.The Seattle Central Labor Council held a debate on the twenty-second aboutlaunching a general strike in solidarity with the shipyard unions. From the floor Wobbliesoverwhelmed those who were trying to conduct the meeting, and the attendees were unableto seriously consider what objectives a general strike might accomplish. The MTC’s AlfredE. Miller tried in vain to define what these objectives should be but was hooted down. Inaddition, many of the locals were without their leaders. Twenty-five of Seattle’s union

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike 161officials were at a Chicago conference planning a nationwide general strike for 4 July 1919should Mooney be refused a new trial. The rank and file left behind in Seattle tended to bemore radical (and less experienced) than their leaders, and a general strike did not seemterribly portentous to them. The meeting ended with the adoption of a resolution callingfor a general strike if a referendum won approval. During the evening of 23 January, eightlocals voted to strike or at least support a general strike. On the twenty-fourth, the SeattleRetail Grocers Association discontinued credit to unemployed strikers. And when on thatsame day the Cooperative Food Products Association offered to help the strikers, policeraided the cooperative under the pretense of looking for an illegal liquor cache, though theywere really seizing office files.When the union officials returned from Chicago and called a meeting on 27January, a three-way split occurred among the 120 attendees. According to the historianRobert Friedheim, the radicals wanted an immediate strike; the progressives wanted toforce the owners to openly declare their intention to establish open shop conditions beforestriking and thereby swing public support to the strikers; and the conservatives wanted toabide by the existing contracts, although they too wanted to subject the owners to publicopprobrium. Whatever they thought, the referendum vote on the general strike could not bestopped. They did agree that if a majority voted for the strike, then they would meet againon 2 February to consider what to do next.Newspaper coverage during the week before the General Strike began is instructive.The two recognized conservative dailies, the Times and P-I, took positions of markedcontrast. The Times laid blame squarely on Piez, while the P-I blamed the radicals’ takeoverof the unions. The Times reported events fairly directly, with minimal sensationalism,which is surprising given its normal anti-union bias. The P-I repeatedly used scare tactics,which tended to inflame the situation. On 30 January the paper ran a front-page editorialclaiming that most unionists opposed the strike and that “[t]he shipyard strike was calledwithout consent of the workers.” The editorial went on to say that a general strike wouldaccomplish nothing and that the shipbuilding industry was a dying industry anyway. Thestrike would show “how completely the unions are under control of their lawless masters”and would be a “Bolshevik holiday.”The Times assured readers that although problems and hardships were to beexpected, J. D. Ross was certain to maintain electric power for homes and streetlights.The paper hoped to counteract the assertion of the International Brotherhood of ElectricalWorkers’ Leon Green that no exceptions would be made. The P-I, on the other hand, gavefull play to Green’s threat, despite the announcement by the General Strike Committee(GSC) that it intended to maintain service for homes and streetlights. (Hulet Wells, as anobserver, attributed much of the public’s fear to Green’s declaration.)In its 31 January front-page editorial, “Turn On The Lights,” the Times maintainedits relatively judicious tone. According to the paper, the strike was without purpose; theEFC’s flat refusal to allow negotiations to proceed, except for on a “certain policy outlinedby the federal authority,” was provocative; the owners should have granted pay raises tocommon labor; and the MTC had been irresponsible. The Times laid blame on all theparties.

162 Part FiveOn 2 February, the day when strikeballots were to be tallied and when actualplanning by the GSC got under way, theTimes gave play to a tentative settlementreached by the shipyard owners and the MTCas a result of mediation by the IndustrialRelations Committee, which consisted ofReverend Mark Matthews, the banker JamesSpangler, and Judge George Donworth. It alsopublicized Piez’s insistence that the shipyardstrike was a contract violation and printed hisremark that the EFC could not “compromiseon a vital moral principle.” Under theheadline “Piez Statement Means Strike,” thearticle reported Piez’s contention that eitherlabor costs needed to be reduced or outputneeded to be increased if the United Stateswas to compete in the world shipbuildingmarket—the global economy was beingdiscussed as early as this! Piez insisted thatno negotiations could begin until the unioncontract expired on 31 March. Underscoringhis determination, Piez instituted a policy ofhiring soldiers and sailors for $4.16 per dayto fill the slots left by the strikers.Photo Webster & Stevens Collection, Courtesy Museum of History and IndustryThe innovative and diplomatic David Rodgerswas both liked by labor and a master at shipconstruction. These talents were an important partof the considerable success of Skinner and Eddy,the Seattle shipyard Rodgers supervised.The Industrial Relations Committee was bypassed by Piez and David Skinner. Ashipyard owners’ negotiating committee had appointed Skinner and two other owners toa subcommittee that was charged with determining a wage offer. When the subcommitteesettled on an offer, it sent the offer to Piez without consulting first with its parent committee.When the shipyard owners’ negotiating committee learned of the offer, it wired Piez torevoke it. Piez responded that the owners should leave the negotiations to him. Within theranks of the shipyard owners, antagonism to Skinner surfaced. William Todd, managerof Tacoma’s Todd Shipyards, asserted, “Shipbuilders are suspicious of Skinner as he iscontinually having meetings with labor men connected to the unions, and Mr. Ro[d]gers,when he is in town, is also getting together with them.” David Rodgers, the personnelmanager of Skinner and Eddy, had become popular with the workers for his policies.Shipyard owners considered Skinner to be an interloper, an “amateur builder.”The Ministerial Federation also worked toward a settlement and telegraphed Piezon 1 February that the workers would return to work if common laborers were given $5.50per day. The Times reported that settlement of the strike hinged on the EFC’s response tothe federation. Piez ran a full-page advertisement on 3 February in the Times, in which hestressed his unwillingness to compromise and his belief that America could not continueto compete with foreign shipyards. He basically reiterated his position. This effectivelyterminated any further mediation efforts.

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike163Responding quickly to the rising labor tensions, the state legislature passed anantisyndicalism act in January, which it modified toward the end of the session. The actwould remain on the books until being repealed in 1937. Henry Suzzallo, as head of theWashington State Defense Council, pronounced the strike “one of the greatest mistakesever made by organized labor.” The state labor commissioner, C. H. Younger, denouncedthe strike leaders and urged their deportation. He did temper his remarks by saying thatthe pay of common labor should be increased. There seemed to be near unanimity on thatissue and Piez could have averted the strike by conceding this one point. But he decidedthat the only way to make U.S. shipbuilders competitive in the world market was to breakthe unions’ power. His belief that the strike was revolutionary only reinforced his “moralprinciple” that contracts should not be broken. And he had all the trump cards, which hecould play at will.Charles PiezA reduced facsimile of theoversized warning that CharlesPiez, Director General of theEmergency Fleet Corporation,placed as paid advertising inSeattle’s local dailies in earlyFebruary 1919 during the secondweek of the shipyard strike and onthe eve of the general strike.

164 Part FiveUpon returning from Chicago, the militant James Duncan, Union Record publisherHarry Ault, and SCLC secretary Frank Rust discovered that no objectives had been set, noprovision for emergency services had been made, and no date for ending the strike had beenconsidered. They immediately proposed to the General Strike Committee that a terminaldate be set but were rebuffed. However, when the GSC met on Sunday, 2 February, itquickly realized that some planning was required. The strike was set to begin at 10 a.m.on 6 February. The GSC formed a subcommittee to make provisions for garbage pickup,hospital and mail services, and the like. To head off Mayor Hanson’s expected use of thepolice to quash the strike, the GSC established a group called the War Veterans Guardto maintain the peace. Three hundred volunteered, and they did keep the peace. Yet nopurpose for the strike was decided upon, nor was a terminal date set. In the haste to preparefor the strike, the committee had lost sight of the original issue: fair wage scales. It seemedas if the radicals in control were expecting some invisible hand to guide them.The General Strike Committee issued a notice of the strike on Monday, 3 February.Leaflets announcing the action were widely distributed. One by Harvey O’Connor of theUnion Record staff set the tone. In his leaflet O’Connor claimed that “Russia did it,” linkingthe strike with a revolutionary purpose—the very objective the GSC was denying. Thisleaflet played into the employers’ hands. The newspapers fed upon it and, above all, on thesoon-to-be-famous editorial by Anna Louise Strong in the 4 February edition of the UnionRecord. It began: “There will be many cheering and there will be some who fear. . . . Weare undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a movewhich will lead—NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!”According to the historian Robert Friedheim, this was the most important statementjustifying the strike. If the GSC had previously stated its objectives—which were certainlynot revolutionary—O’Connor and Strong would not have seemed credible. Now theyseemed to be, in the absence of strong GSC leadership. Friedheim concludes, “With thiseditorial, Anna Louise Strong destroyed the possibility that anyone would negotiate withlabor to settle the strike.” Unconditional surrender became inevitable. Strong’s biographer,Stephanie Ogle, learned that Harry Ault had seen the editorial two days before it was printedand refused to print it. It was slipped by him while he was preoccupied.The Star, in its 4 February edition, cautioned the labor movement that despite the“insolent attitude of the shipyard owners . . . [and] the verbosity of Piez,” there was noexcuse for the “highhanded tactics of the labor leaders” or for those leaders to call a generalstrike that was bound to fail. It characterized any revolutionary aims as absurd. The Stareditorial was reprinted in the other dailies as an advertisement. The P-I reprinted Strong’seditorial in full in its morning edition on 5 February.During the evening of 4 February, two hundred delegates, drawn from thirty-sixlocal organizations, formed a citizens’ committee to head off the strike. The committeewas led by the chamber of commerce president A. J. Rhodes and included Reverend MarkMatthews (who had close ties with some labor leaders, including James Duncan, a memberof his church) and the respected banker James Spangler. After three hours the hastilyassembled committee gave up, concluding that the strike aims were indeed revolutionary.

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike165There will be many cheering, and there will be somewho fear. Both these emotions are useful, but not too muchof either. We are undertaking the most tremendous moveever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will leadNO ONE KNOWS WHERE! We do not need hysteria. We need theiron march of labor.LABOR WILL FEED THE PEOPLE. Twelve great kitchenshave been offered, and from them food will be distributedby the provision trades at low cost to all. LABOR WILLCARE FOR THE BABIES AND THE SICK. The milk-wagon driversand the laundry drivers are arranging plans for supplyingmilk to babies, invalids and hospitals, and taking care ofthe cleaning of linen for hospitals. LABOR WILL PRESERVEORDER. The strike committee is arranging for guards, andit is expected that the stopping of cars will keep peopleat home.A few hot-headed enthusiasts have complained thatstrikers only should be fed, and the general public left toendure severe discomfort. Aside from the inhumanitariancharacter of such suggestions, let them get this straight– NOT THE WITHDRAWAL OF LABOR POWER, BUT THE POWER OF THEWORKERS TO MANAGE WILL WIN THIS STRIKE. What does Mr.Piez of the Shipping Board care about the closing downof Seattle’s shipyards, or even of all the industries ofthe northwest. Will it not merely strengthen the yardsat Hog Island, in which he is more interested. When theshipyard owners of Seattle were on the point of agreeingwith the workers, it was Mr. Piez who wired them that ifthey agreed – HE WOULD NOT LET THEM HAVE STEEL. Whetherthis is camouflage we have not means of knowing. But we doknow that the great eastern combinations of capitalistsCOULD AFFORD to offer privately to Mr. Skinner, Mr. Amesand Mr. Duthie a few millions apiece in eastern shipyardstock. RATHER THAN LET THE WORKERS WIN. The closingdown of Seattle’s industries as a MERE SHUTDOWN, willnot affect these easterngentlemen much. They couldlet the whole northwest goto pieces, as far as money alone is concerned. BUT,the closing down of the capitalistically controlledindustries of Seattle, while the WORKERS ORGANIZE tofeed the people, to care for the babies and the sick,to preserver order – THIS will move them. For thislooks too much like the taking over of POWER by theworkers.Labor will not only SHUT DOWN the industries,but Labor will REOPEN, under the management of theappropriate trades, such activities as are needed topreserve public health and public peace. If the strikecontinues, Labor may feel led to avoid public sufferingby reopening more and more activities. UNDER ITSOWN MANAGEMENT. And that is why we say that we arestarting on a road that lead – NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!

166 Part FiveThe foreboding warning printed on 4 February, 1919 inThe Seattle Star.Mayor Hanson met with the GSCon 6 February to ensure electrical service,imploring Duncan (who was not a GSCmember) to intervene. Duncan pleadedhelplessness. Hanson pronounced LeonGreen (author of the rumor of an electricalpower shutdown) an “alien, slacker,Bolsheviki, and IWW.” Green’s role inthe strike has never been established.He might well have been a provocateur,instead of an irresponsible radical. YetGreen was presumed by all parties to beacting with authority. The strike leaderswere unable to stifle Green’s rumor, andthe damage to the strike was irreparable.The P-I gave full play to the rumor,along with alleged assertions from someradicals that they would spread the strikeacross the state.On 5 February the Star outdiditself with its patriotic flare. Under theheadline “UNDER WHICH FLAG?”the paper opined that this was more thana general strike—it was “an acid test of American citizenship—an acid test of all thoseprinciples for which our soldiers and sailors fought and died.” The paper then asked again,“Under which flag do you stand?”Historically, the Star’s publishers hadconsidered their paper to be the voice of labor. However,its circulation was cut in half when the Union Recordbecame the first trade union daily in the country in April1918. The Star’s role during the strike was probablycolored by this circumstance, although it had alreadybecome extremely patriotic during the war, transformingitself as the Municipal League had.The P-I greeted its readers the morning the strikebegan, 6 February, with a front-page cartoon depictinga red flag, with the Stars and Stripes below it, hangingover Seattle. Its front-page editorial read, “Today israised the issue between American Democracy and theorganized forces of revolt, insurrection, and rebellion.We will let Mr. Piez settle the shipyard strike. . . . If heOpposite page: Anna Louise Strong’s troubling editorial is reprintedhere with her portrait, beside a facsimile of the editorial as it appearedin the Union Record, 4 February, 1919.James Spangler

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike167One of the few surviving photographs of events connected to the General Strike (upper-left) shows fresh deputieslining up for pistols. Directly below the photograph—and reading like its caption—is a headline from the 4February issue of The Seattle Star that reports the Mayor’s intention—and exaggeration—to keep the peace byarming 10,000 volunteers. At the bottom of this newsprint montage are parts of the front pages from two Post-Intelligencer issues that announce the beginning and end of the General Strike, February 4 and 11 respectively.Their patriotic cartoons are by a P-I artist identified as “Fung,” and they characterize the strike as a battle forSeattle between “Our Flag” and a flag identified as “Red” that begins the strike week inflated and flapping like asheet tied to a pole in a wind storm but ends it in tatters.

168 Part FiveInserted between two Seattle Star strike week front pages(from Thursday, 6 February and Saturday, 8 February) isanother of the rare strike photos. It was recorded onFriday, 7 February 1919, the second day of the GeneralStrike, by a photographer from the Webster & StevensStudio. The scene looks north on Seventh Avenuetowards a crowd of men (one woman appears on theporch, far left) that are lined up to either side of UnionStreet. A corner of the Dreamland Theatre—a favoritehaunt for labor-related assemblies and often noted inthese pages—is on the far right. The tower behind it topsthe Unitarian Church.wants to close the shipyards and throw[the workers] into the bay let him do so—and not a few will say ‘good riddance.’”Though the Times editors remainedcool, the paper’s Washington, D.C.,correspondent reported in his column,“Jermaine’s Dispatch,” that the strike“will mark the beginning of an effort ofthe radical elements to control Americanlabor. . . . Seattle is a stronghold ofRadicals [according to AFL leaders]. . .. If the radicals win on the Pacific Coasttheir control will spread.”One hour before he was to meetwith the GSC on 6 February to deal withemergencies, Mayor Hanson contactedthe state attorney general and Suzzallo,who were acting for Governor Listerduring his mortal illness. Hanson pleadedfor the National Guard’s intervention tosuppress the strike. Suzzallo, as head ofthe Washington State Defense Council,phoned the secretary of war to ask forfederal troops. The War Departmentdispatched the First Infantry Division toTacoma (where a sympathy strike wasanticipated) and Seattle; one battalionwent to Fort Lawton. Hanson thenbeefed up the police force, adding 600recruits, paying them $6.00 per day tothe disgruntlement of the regular force,whose pay was but $4.25. Then herecruited about 2,400 volunteer policefrom the university fraternities, theReserve Officers’ Training Corps, andcivic organizations, arming them withclubs and firearms, when they wereavailable.The GSC, just two hours beforethe strike began, became focused ontactical details: admitting Japaneseworkers to the unions in a participatoryrole (they would not be allowed to vote);setting up feeding stations; arranging for

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike169milk deliveries; assuring hospitals; maintaining discipline, even among the Wobblies; andmeeting other problems as they came up. It succeeded in all these efforts, taking pride inthe solidarity that it had brought about. This was one of the few accomplishments that theGSC could claim after the strike.The strike proceeded quietly: no arrests, no soapbox oratory, just unease. Unknownto Seattleites, Hanson issued a long statement to local United Press representativesin which he explained that the strike was a revolution and that he would not deal withrevolutionaries. His comments were for national consumption: he was planning on seekinga high government post. On 7 February Hanson persuaded Duncan to set up a six-mandelegation to meet with him. At the meeting, he threatened to declare martial law unlessDuring the General Strike the Seattle Mayor and The Seattle Star became chums promoting each other. Thepost-strike mood of “no compromise” is already broadcast on Monday, 11 February, the last full day of the strike.The next day’s issue includes a “Letter from the Mayor” (enlarged on the right) that compliments the Star forsaving Seattle. The Thursday, 13 February issue continues the lesson with a front page editorial proclaimingthat “labor will clean house . . . will reaffirm its Americanism and . . . forever outlaw the Bolsheviks, the I.W.W., therevolutionists and the un-American.”

170 Part Fivethe strike was called off by eight o’clock on Saturday, the eighth. But after the meeting,General John Morrison assured the union leaders that only he could declare martial law.The mayor and the strikers remained at loggerheads.But on that Saturday morning, the streetcar men began drifting back to work. A. L.Kempster reported to the Boston headquarters of Stone and Webster on the ninth: “We feelthe return of the trainmen to work will almost break the strike as it is anticipated that manysmaller unions which quit thru [sic] intimidation, will now go to work.” The Teamsters andother unions did indeed slowly follow the streetcar men back to work.Now that the solid front had been broken, the Star led the hue and cry: “There canbe no compromise on Americanism.” The Argus chauvinistically portrayed the strikers asbeing “[r]iffraff from Europe” and urged army intervention. The AFL leaders sent officialsfrom the striking unions’ international offices to Seattle to persuade the locals to quit thestrike. The Union Record resumed publication, after having shut down to honor the strikeduring its first few days. During the shutdown, the unions were deprived of a voice tocounter the opposition’s contention that the strike was revolutionary.Nevertheless, the Central Labor Council declared that solidarity had been achievedand decided on a resolution urging termination of the strike by midnight that night. Duncanand Ault jointly presented the resolution to the GSC but were shouted down. Next, HuletWells, who was warmly welcomed at the meeting and who had opposed the use of theGeneral Strike for ordinary union purposes (such as wage scales and working conditions),urged George Ryan, as secretary of the county Democratic Party, to telegraph PresidentWilson to ask for intervention. Wells reported that a small, determined group composed ofWobblies and communists within the Metal Trades Council blocked this plan. Wells laterestimated that these two factions formed about one-half of the MTC’s membership.Despite the resistance of the radicals in the Metal Trades Council, locals met onSunday to vote. Only the longshoremen and the cooks voted to continue the strike. OnMonday the GSC found little sentiment for continuing, as strikers steadily returned towork. The GSC capitulated, calling an official end to the strike on Tuesday, 11 February.The Town Crier offered the following epitaph on 28 August, as Ole Hanson resigned asmayor to barnstorm the country in pursuit of national office.The strike was begun with a well-known opposition to it amongfully half the strikers themselves. . . . Government rulings were the causeof it. Right at hand was a large body of soldiers. There never was a chancefor a riot or frequent affrays. The strike had lasted only three or four days,during which time there was not one affray in Seattle, not even, as theTown Crier recalls it, a street corner row. All that Mr. Hanson did was at thebeginning to issue a proclamation that he would maintain law and order,and this he did not do until he was seriously interviewed by a number ofbusiness men. No sooner was the strike broken than he was proclaimedfrom one part of the country to the other. Seattle had been saved from thetorch and America from the Bolsheviki, by the good right arm of citizen,loving father, the devoted husband, Hanson the model American . . . out ofa mere proclamation which it was in his line with his sworn duty to issue.

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike171The paper added that Hanson had resigned after claiming credit for procuring theSkagit site for the city and purchasing the street railways, the latter of which was obtained“from a company which could hardly conceal its joy in selling its assets.”Another epitaph was written by the astute insider Hulet Wells in his unpublishedautobiography. He concluded that the “loudest advocates” of the General Strike were the“mass actionists,” who “formed a small but noisy fraction of organized labor. . . . Onewas the I.W.W. . . . the other was a small number of communists who . . . were weavingromantic dreams in the belief that Russia had laid the foundation for world revolution. . . .These two factions dominated the left, but hated each other bitterly.”That such a momentous event as the General Strike took place when it could haveeasily been prevented is odd. Substantial opposition to Piez’s intervention in the shipyardstrike had spread across the city. Newspaper opinion was sympathetic to the plight ofthe common laborer. Piez’s aim to break the shipyard unions was certainly shared by theshipyard owners. If the objective of Piez and the owners to establish the open shop couldhave been made apparent to the public, even broader support could have been generated.The public did not take kindly to Piez’s threats. But the radical takeover of the MetalTrades Council when the regular union leaders were absent allowed revolutionary rhetoricto obscure reality. The IWW was able to create an air of mystique around the GeneralStrike, and Harvey O’Connor and Anna Louise Strong were able to spin a romantic illusionabout the timeliness of revolution as they performed the last rites on capitalism. Whenit seemed that the voters would favor a general strike, the newspapers played upon thisrhetoric, thereby conveying to the publicthat the strikers had a revolutionaryobjective. In the absence of any contrarydeclaration from the GSC, or even theSCLC, this became the prevalent belief.In the aftermath the open shop triumphedacross the city and nation. Called theAmerican Plan, it became the acceptedgospel for the next fifteen years, thoughit was tempered somewhat by marketforces.The Post-Intelligencer’s own caption on Friday, 14February, 1919 for this scene by staff photographJacobs reads“The files, correspondence propagandaand other matter belonging, it is alleged, toBolshevists in Seattle, were seized by agents ofProsecuting Attorney Fred C. Brown in raids onoffices in the Liberty Building and 419 and 324 PacificBlock. It is locked in the prosecutor’s vaults and willfigure as evidence in the cases of the men arrested.”The headline on the International Weekly proppedon the barrel in the photograph, upper-right, reads,“Capitalism Tottering . . . Can 60,000 Workers OperateIndustry Without Bosses?”

172 Part FiveCivil liberties had been severelyrestrained during the war, and theserestraints were not yet relaxed by thetime the General Strike took place, justthree months after the armistice. Thecareless assertions of revolutionary aimscolored public opinion long after thestrike was over. Labor militancy, even inthe peaceful form of unionization, cameunder suspicion as being un-American.Although the Times initially cautionedlocal employers against capitalizing onthe public’s bitterness toward unions, itsmoderation was short lived.The Times, Town Crier, and Argusfollowed the lead of the Star and P-I bypraising Ole Hanson and the police chief,Joel Warren, for facing down the strikers.Previously, they had portrayed Hanson asa buffoon and unprincipled opportunist.However, when Hanson resigned on 28August 1919, the Town Crier resumed itsearlier characterizations. The other paperssimilarly dismissed him.Setting the tone for the comingmonths, Chief Warren ordered a raid onSocialist Party headquarters on 9 Februaryand arrested three men on the streetfor circulating the party’s newspaper.This was followed by a raid on an IWWhangout on 14 February and the arrest ofthirty-nine men because Warren was “tiredof reading their revolutionary circulars . . .and decided to just lock them up.” Arrestslike this had become commonplace underWarren. Earlier, on 12 January, while theshipyard issue was heating up, he hadordered the breakup of a parade of morethan 500 “Reds” that had about 5,000onlookers. Thirteen men were arrestedwithout charge. On 19 January about onehundred police assisted the immigrationservice commissioner Henry White inrounding up 316 “Russians,” 27 of whom were detained for investigation.First with its protest on Wednesday, May 14, 1919 overthe “police perpetrate(d) outrage” the night beforeon a “peaceable meeting called under the auspices ofthe American Federation of Labor” and then by its callthe following day, Thursday, for a second “Huge MassMeeting” to “Test Liberty” the Union Record scored avictory. The planned Sunday protest was also held atFourth Avenue and Virginia Street (on a corner lot clearedwith the Denny Regrade and still undeveloped) and drewfive thousand. This time the police were notably absentbut, the paper reported, “Acting Mayor W. D. Lane stoodnear the platform during the entire meeting.” Bothmeetings were held “to discuss the Mooney case . . . Acollection of $420 for the defense of Mooney and otherclass-war prisoners was gathered from the huge crowd,which stood shoulder to shoulder on and around thevacant lot.”

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike 173During the strike Warren had closed the Equity Printing Plant—whose manager,Walker C. Smith, was a prominent Wobbly—for printing radical literature; on 15 Februaryhe placed police on the premises to censor anything printed. Not until a public outcry inJune against these First Amendment violations were police removed. Warren had beenand would continue to act under the authority of a city ordinance, which gave the chiefthe discretion to determine whether unlawful acts had been committed by the citizenry. Itwould be impossible to prove in court that the chief had acted “maliciously” in carrying outthis broad legal mandate.Under the state’s January 1919 antisyndicalism law, twenty-eight Wobblies werebeing held for ostensible leadership of the General Strike. When George Vanderveersuccessfully defended James Bruce, twenty-four of the others were set free. Walker Smithand two others remained in custody. Under the law, James King, a Wobbly, was arrested forsoliciting funds for the General Strike Victims Defense Fund. The charge: “disseminationof doctrines inimical to public tranquility and orderly government.”Throughout the spring and summer, police continued to break up open-air meetings.Even conservatives in the Central Labor Council complained about these free speechviolations. They were so disturbed that they supported the SCLC’s sponsorship of a protestmeeting, at which money was raised for the Mooney Defense Fund. About five thousandpeople attended the meeting, held in mid-May at Fourth Avenue and Virginia Street.Even the Health Department got into the action, closing the IWW hall in Julybecause it was unsanitary. Not to be outdone, Henry White arrested more than fiftyItalians and Russians in May without serious charge and shipped them to New York fordeportation, where fourteen were released upon arrival. George Listman was dismissedfrom the Civil Service Commission by Mayor Hanson for putting up the bond for WalkerSmith. Anna Louise Strong’s brother-in-law, Charles Niederhauser, was dismissed by theschool board for what it considered unpatriotic activities, despite his defense by the schoolsuperintendent Frank Cooper and the UW president Henry Suzzallo. At the same meeting,the board also banned the controversial Robinson and Beard textbook that had been atissue throughout the prewar and wartime period. When would the wartime “emergency”be over? Not soon.The police actions noted above were taken under cover of law, yet they wereviolations of the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth amendments. Arbitrary application of the“anti-Red” ordinance became the rule. The authorities could rationalize these violations byreferring to the personal pronouncements of some strike leaders that the strike’s aims wererevolutionary. The facts that no revolutionary acts were committed and that the GeneralStrike Committee took every measure to assure domestic tranquility indicate the absurdityof the civil authorities’ overreaction to the strike. A question rises as to the motives ofthese authorities and of those groups who pressed them to act as they did during and afterthe strike. Part of the answer will be found when we examine the resurgent open shopmovement.After World War I, dissension in the union movement was rampant. The progressiveDuncanites had held the conservatives and radicals together for a decade under JimmyDuncan’s militant leadership. Duncanites had kept the concept of industrial unionism atthe fore, much to the embarrassment of the Washington State Federation of Labor. While

174 Part Fivepressing for industrial unionism’s acceptanceby the AFL leadership, Duncanites nonethelessinsisted on working within the AFL framework.Characterized as “slowing down the radicals andspeeding up the AFL,” Duncanites opposed theIWW for being a disruptive, divisive force inthe labor movement, guilty of propagating dualunionism. For example, Wobblies encouragedthose with an AFL card to also carry the IWW’s“red card,” a tactic that the group called “boringwithin.”The Duncanites had lost control of theGeneral Strike because they had been at themeeting in Chicago. They opposed a generalstrike on principle, but by the time they returnedthey found it impossible to reassert their control.After the radicals suffered defeat in the strike, theDuncanites and conservatives regained control.Conservative locals either threatened to withdrawor did withdraw from the Central Labor Council.Frank Waterhouse, perhaps the most influential shipper on the Seattle Waterfront through the First World War,began as an English stenographer with his own system of shorthand. When the steamer Portland arrived withits “ton of gold” in 1897, Waterhouse rushed to England and convinced partners to join the Alaska parade. Theypurchased the Garonne, which garnered its Alaskan distinction when it was the first ship to reach Nome for the1899 season. Either by his own fleet or in agency for others, Waterhouse became Seattle’s principle link with theports of Asia. During the First World War he ran scores of ships for the U.S. Shipping Board.

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General StrikeThe conservative Building Trades Council, for example, forced the Duncanites to join it inreorganizing the SCLC and electing new officers. The Metal Trades Council, previouslyled by the radical-leaning Local 104 of the Boilermakers Union, was taken over by theconservatives. Because of this internal dissension, the Central Labor Council was oftenunable to support striking unions, and strikes were usually lost.The radicals had three objectives in the aftermath of the strike: to unseat WilliamShort as head of the Washington State Federation of Labor, to force the Central LaborCouncil and the state federation to accept the One Big Union concept, and to gain control ofthe Union Record. At the June 1919 federation meeting, they failed to oust Short. However,they succeeded in passing a One Big Union resolution that would be voted upon by therank and file. Upon learning of this, the AFL executive committee threatened to withdrawthe state federation’s charter if the rank and file was allowed to vote. At the August SCLCmeeting, the state federation introduced a motion to rescind the resolution. Duncanitesjoined the conservatives in rescinding it. At this same meeting, Short countered the attemptby the One Big Union forces to establish a labor political party by getting the state Grangeand the railroad brotherhoods to form the Triple Alliance to “secure remedial legislation”instead. The Triple Alliance mounted a voter registration drive in August and Septemberthat scared the employers into taking desperate measures.Duncanites had joined with radicals in April in passing a resolution for a referendumvote on 1 July to determine whether the SCLC should support a nationwide strike forMooney that would take place on 4 July. At the July meeting, the Teamsters refused tosupport such a strike, contending it would be too small to do much good; the BoilermakersUnion also refused, because there seemed insufficient national sympathy for one. No strikematerialized. Radical attempts to take over the Union Record climaxed in 1921 and will becovered in the context of events occurring at that time.Now we will discuss how the open shop movement was reinvigorated by the failure ofthe General Strike. The week after the General Strike, A. L. Kempster reported on the“labor situation” to Stone and Webster. “The trouble, apparently beginning as far back asthe Cotterel [sic] administration, is about to come to a head; labor has been fostered andsympathized with by the city government and Scrips’ [sic], papers until they believe theyshould run the town. . . . We broke the union’s grip on the city and from now on, we willprobably be an open shop town.” When speaking of the Scripps papers, he was referring tothe Star. Indicative of this trend toward restoring the open shop, the Seattle Gas Companylocked out union men on 12 February, inviting them to tear up their union cards and workfor seventy-five cents less a day. The Teamsters complained about the trouble they werehaving getting their men back at the gas company and at the Frye plant. Central LaborCouncil minutes record many instances of employer discrimination against strikers, but thecouncil was too distracted by internal dissension to help out.Complicating matters further was the arrest of Harry Ault, Anna Louise Strong,and other Union Record staffers under the January antisyndicalism act. Ault’s arrest andsubsequent preoccupation with his trial allowed the more radical staffers free range, andthe paper became even more vulnerable to charges of radicalism. In February 1919 thechamber of commerce urged its members to boycott those businesses that advertised inthe Union Record. Its objective was to drive the newspaper out of business because, as175

176 Part Fiveone labor spy of the Associated Industries of Seattle (formerly the Employers’ Associationof Washington) reported, “No one can fully realize the tremendous influence this papercarries among the workers and even among a large body of small business men.” TheUnion Record’s circulation surpassed that of its main rival, the Star. Seattle bankers begantheir boycott of the newspaper that month. The Central Labor Council countered theboycott by establishing the Trade Union Savings and Loan Association to help fund theUnion Record and to meet the financial needs of unions. A few weeks after the boycottstarted, William Short, president of the labor federation, added his voice of discontent tothe chorus, accusing Ault of withholding federation news.Given the dissent within the labor movement, this was an ideal opportunity forthe employers to reinvigorate the open shop movement. During the war, labor scarcity andthe federal government’s encouragement of union recognition as a means of sustainingproduction had frustrated the open shop efforts of the Employers’ Association.On 4 March the shipping magnate Frank Waterhouse and members of the WaterfrontEmployers’ Association (formerly the Waterfront Employers’ Union) posted the notice“[A]ny man who does not support the principles of the American government will not beemployed.” The notice was directed at longshoremen and truckers. But the Great Northern’srefusal to hire only union men on the grounds that doing so would violate the FederalRailroad Administration’s nondiscrimination policy was interpreted by the InternationalLongshoremen’s Association as the opening shot of the open shop movement. To makeits point clear, the GN fired about half of its union employees and replaced them withnonunion workers. It also tried to establish a GN hiring hall. The strike and lockout thatfollowed was labeled “Bolsheviki in its nature” by the GN. The company, however, seemedto have pushed its luck too far: the Federal Railroad Administration ordered restoration ofthe government hiring hall in early May.This experience led the Associated Industries of Seattle (AIS) to form a group ofnonunion laborers: the American Craftsmen and Workmen (ACW). It was funded by thewealthy A. C. Bickford, formerly a captain in the army. Its nucleus was a group of Americanworkmen—primarily former servicemen—who resented the fact that “foreigners” and“unpatriotic” men were taking jobs that they wanted. The group contended that foreignersmade up sixty percent of the city’s labor force. American nativity was required formembership in the ACW. The group insisted that no one of foreign birth be hired beforethey were, that all disputes be arbitrated, and that employers be given the right to hire andfire at will. Waterfront employers used the ACW in future dock disputes.The Associated Industries of Seattle itself adopted the tactics of its predecessor:coercing nonmember employers into breaking union contracts that they had already signedand assisting nonmember employers in resisting unionization. The association employedspies and provocateurs to infiltrate unions and worked to force the Union Record out ofbusiness. An AIS representative visited every business in the city, delivering the antiunionmessage. Its labor committee included Broussais Beck, manager of the Bon Marché, towhom Agent 106 reported; C. C. Carpenter of the MacDougall-Southwick DepartmentStore; D. E. Frederick of Frederick and Nelson; the P-I publisher and lumberman ClarkNettleton; Clarence Blethen; A. J. Rhodes of the Rhodes Department Store; and H.Schoenfeld of Standard Furniture.

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike177For all practical purposes, the AIS was the creature of the chamber of commerce.The latter voted in late October 1919 to oppose the closed shop and published in threedaily newspapers the “Declaration of the Industrial Situation,” in which it proclaimed,“[E]very workman should have an opportunity to earn a wage proportionate to his abilityand productive capacity.” A referendum ballot was attached to the proclamation, and anybusiness that failed to respond was automatically put in the questionable category.Now that it was a time of peace, the Minute Men were willing to serve theiroriginal sponsors: employers. The chamber had endorsed the group in November 1917.The organization applied for reendorsement just before the General Strike; the chamberapproved its request on 18 February 1919. That Minute Men and the AIS were working intandem is indicated by a report that Agent 106 made. He wrote that in May the two groupshad infiltrated the Soldiers and Sailors Council and had relocated the council’s offices totheir own building for closer collaboration.A. L. Kempster, in his final report in April to Stone and Webster headquarters inBoston (the city would take ownership of the traction system on 1 April 1919), noted thatthe shipyards had “absorbed most of Seattle’s idle labor.” However in early May the U.S.Shipping Board canceled more contracts, which put more laborers out of work. Quicklyresponding to the growing labor surplus, Skinner and Eddy cut wages and met no resistance.Kemper’s successor, Donald Barnes, observed in June that shipyards were now setting newproduction records, operating at “war time speed” and not encountering union resistanceto the production speedup, so passive had workers and their unions become in the face ofspreading unemployment, locally and nationwide.Strikes became common nationwide once the federal government stoppedprotecting unionization after the armistice. Only 1.2 million wage earners struck in 1918;4.2 million struck in 1919. Industrial relations grew tenser in September when Boston’spolicemen struck and Governor Calvin Coolidge called in the National Guard to put thestrike down. President Wilson called a conference on industrial relations to try to bringpeace at home. On 21 September a monumental nationwide steel strike began, with theAFL seeking union recognition as well as the end ofboth the twelve-hour workday and company unions. Inthe violence that followed, twenty lives were lost. Inrefusing even to confer with the AFL, Judge Elbert Gary,who was also chairman of the board of the United StatesSteel Corporation, set the tone in industrial relations forthe next fifteen years. The United States Steel open shopmodel was shaped by Judge Gary, John D. RockefellerJr., and Henry Clay Frick. It became known as theAmerican Plan. Upon its first application, the plan wassuccessful, ending the steelworkers strike in January1920.Across the country, chambers of commerce, theNational Association of Manufacturers, and employerorganizations in general proclaimed the plan as theirown. Under the American Plan, individuals signed laborThe front cover to Melvin W.Cassmore’s ultimately recalled study“Profitism Slackism and You.”

178 Part Fiveagreements in which they promised not to join a union or to encourage others to joinone—the infamous “yellow-dog contracts.” The employers were also able to get courtinjunctions against threatened strikes even easier than they had in the past. The St. GermainBakery case cited earlier set a precedent for such injunctions. Company unions—thosecontrolled by the employers—became common by the mid-1920s: there were more than400 by 1926, with a membership of 1.4 million, which expanded to about 2.5 million by1935. Regular trade unions had about five million members in 1921; their numbers hadfallen to 3.4 million by 1929.The turmoil in industrial relations was reflected in Seattle in September 1919,where not only the steel plants but also the tailor shops (employing about 200 women)were shut down. Agent 181 reported to the AIS officer Roy Kinnear, in March 1920, that130 tailors were still on strike, more than 100 were working in union shops, about 100had deserted the city, and about 100 had returned to work at fourteen dollars per week.The Master Builders Association refused to deal with the Building Trades Council; theassociation declared for the open shop and imported strikebreakers. Some independentbuilders risked operating a union shop, though, and paid the union scale. The gas workerswere in the fifth week of their strike, but the Seattle Gas Company nevertheless was ableto maintain normal operations. Female barbers went on strike. The typographers struckninety-seven shops in the city. The AIS threatened any business with retaliation if it sentwork to any union shops. The first week of November saw no relaxation as a nationwidecoal strike closed mines in the Green River, Carbonado, Roslyn, and Cle Elum regions. ByNovember the open shop had become standard.The city council could not stand idly by while these momentous events transpired.It passed a bill by a five to four vote in mid-October that made it unlawful “to organize,help to organize, give aid to or voluntarily assemble with any organization or group ofpersons which advocate crime, sedition, violence, intimidation or injury as a means ofeffecting or resisting any industrial, economic, social or political change.” The foreign warhad been transformed into a class war by this edict. The four councilmen who resisted thismeasure were Oliver Erickson, Warren Lane, and two union members, Robert Hesketh andThomas Bolton.At this time the voter registration drive of the Triple Alliance was proving sosuccessful that AIS leaders were becoming alarmed. Not to worry—Agent 106 reassuringlyreported that the radicals, because of their syndicalist position, were staunchly opposingthe alliance whenever it surfaced at SCLC meetings. (The radicals believed that the worseconditions under capitalism became, the nearer the country was to revolution.) Bickfordof the AIS was not easily reassured and fretted about preservation of Americanism againstthis “Red menace.”Seattle’s reputation for unstable labor relations was discouraging investment.To counter this image, the chamber of commerce’s Labor Relations Committee hired anengineer, Melvin W. Cassmore, to prepare a pamphlet. In the pamphlet, titled Profitism,Slackism, and You: A Constructive Study of the Labor Problem, Cassmore contended thatthe general public supported employers in their open shop drive after the General Strikebut that more than the open shop must be offered to restore labor peace and to increaseproductivity. Cassmore argued that the market and the courts would take care of profiteering

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike179but that productivity could be increased only by cooperation between employers andemployees. The consumer would be the ultimate beneficiary. He advocated adoption of theshop committee system then being promulgated in Great Britain. In this system employeerepresentatives met periodically with management for “discussion and settlement ofquestions about industrial relations, the welfare of the industry, and its workers.” Bonuseswould be paid to cooperative workers, and uncooperative workers would be identified andisolated.The Associated Industries leadership was so disturbed by the pamphlet that a specialmeeting was called by the chamber on 19 October. The AIS sharply rebuked the chamberfor choosing an alternative to the open shop and reminded the chamber that before theGeneral Strike, eighty-five percent of the employers belonging to the AIS were operatingunder closed shop conditions, while now seventy-five percent were operating under theAmerican Plan. The AIS also reminded the chamber that it claimed 2,500 members andthat through its American Craftsmen and Workmen it had placed 8,000 men in city plants.The chamber was humbled by this recitation and agreed not to publish anything in thefuture on labor relations without first submitting it to the AIS for approval.Clarence Blethen then organized a raid on the Union Record by soldiers andAmerican Legionaries, and had a “dummy page” prepared for an “extra,” but there wereplenty of ex-servicemen at the nearbyLabor Temple to fight back sono raid took place.Blethen then took the ageingU.S. Attorney Robert Saunders(who owed his position to Blethen’sinfluence) to Tacoma where hecoerced Saunders to sign an orderclosing down the Union Record.According to Earl Shimmons(whose brief history of the UnionRecord is in the Ault papers at theUniversity of Washington Library’sSpecial Collections), “Tacomareporters telegraphed the story toSeattle so that news of the federalraid appeared in the form of extrasbefore it had taken place. Federalmen entered the office of the UnionRecord just as the night edition wasbeing made up, about 1 o’clock,November 13. They servedwarrants on Ault, Anna Louise Strong,and later Frank Rust, secretary, andGeorge P. Listman, president of theUnion Record Publishing CompanyThe Labor Temple stood at the northeast corner of Sixth Avenueand University. It can be identified immediately below the centerof this view from First Hill by its irregular roofline. The prospectis to the northwest. Top-center is the Standard Furniture building(later the Gap) at the northwest corner of Second Avenue andPine Street.

180 Part Fivecharging them with violation of the espionage act. Presses were stopped and the federalsbegan collecting a mass of books, files and other printed materials . . . and [they were] takento federal headquarters. Bail for those arrested was quickly raised and a crowd collectedaround the Union Record Building.”Union Record reporters interviewed Saunders on his return from Tacoma and weretold that the closure was not permanent “and that the paper could go on publishing. A bigextra was printed at 7 o’clock . . .[affirming] that the paper had not been suppressed.”Shimmons continues, “So the next morning Col. [sic] Blethen and his satellites gothold of the district attorney [sic] again and told him that ‘he had to go through with it now’and keep the Union Record plant closed. So Saunders reversed himself . . .”The staff then began a search for another press to resume publishing in order notto lose the newspaper’s mailing privileges. However, after six days orders came fromWashington that reversed Saunders reversals and the Union Record plant was restoredfor publishing. Shimmons concludes, “Judge Jeremiah Neterer quashed the indictmentsagainst those arrested on the ground that the charges did not constitute a crime.” JudgeJames Ronald also dismissed the charge against Union Record editor Ault.Blethen followed up by persuading the local postmaster to ban the newspaper fromthe mail, thereby hurting the newspaper financially and preventing the public from learninga different version of the Centralia Massacre. Short then hurried by rail to Washington,D.C., where he successfully urged the U.S. Postal Service to lift the ban. During the sixdayban, the Union Record was published at a Fremont print shop and privately distributed.Agent 106 reported that the shutdown was the “topic of discussion” at the Labor Temple.He also volunteered that employers wanted the paper shut down until after the Decemberelection because of the large labor vote expected as a result of the Triple Alliance’s voterregistration drive.Blethen then began buying up the newsprint from the Union Record’s supplier,forcing Ault to pay higher prices than the competition. The Times, Star, and P-I combinedto lower their prices from five cents to two cents a copy, so anxious were they to bury theUnion Record. The latter dropped its price accordingly, just as it was spending money todefend Ault, Strong, and George Listman from sedition charges for their alleged roles inthe General Strike. Listman was also running for a school board position in December amidthe din generated by the three opposition dailies.Harry Ault had to defend the Union Record not only from the AIS but also fromthe radicals’ attacks. Fearing a loss of the AFL’s credibility among the rank and file, Shortwrote the federation’s national secretary, Frank Morrison, on 23 October that Seattle isin the throes of an open shop fight, “especially in the building and printing trades.” Heasked to have international officers authorize strike action to “restore general confidencein the National Movement.” Short also assured Morrison that there was no justificationfor the federal raid on the Union Record because the paper had “been pursuing a rationaland constructive policy for some time.” The friction between Short and Ault seemed tohave ended because of the radicals’ continuing attacks on Ault. In contrast, Puget SoundPower and Light Company’s Donald Barnes wrote Stone and Webster that suppression ofthe paper had been a “good thing and probably will result in a thorough cleaning in theNorthwest.”

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike181Events in Centralia caused unrealistic apprehension among some business leaders.At the 13 November meeting of the chamber of commerce, Frank Waterhouse worriedabout the potential danger to the chamber’s building as well as to its members. ThomasBurke and the former senator Samuel Piles urged the trustees to take steps to “protect themeeting place and the lives of those who are here.” Adding to the hysteria was the BusinessChronicle publisher Edwin Selvin’s call for more violent vigilantism. At the urging of theMetal Trades Council, police arrested the publisher, adding his name to those from theUnion Record who had been charged with sedition. The grand jury dismissed the chargesagainst Selvin. Its foreman was the banker Ebenezer Shorrock, who was running for theschool board against George Listman, one of the Union Record’s staffers charged withsedition. Unsurprisingly, Shorrock won in December.Though the Duncanites had lost control of theCentral Labor Council during the General Strike, theygradually began forging linkages with the WashingtonState Federation of Labor. As they regained influence,they turned the labor movement toward political action.With the Democratic Party practically defunct in thestate and the Republican Party dominated by the mostreactionary elements, a third party seemed essential.Divisions within the Triple Alliance soonsurfaced. In preparation for the March 1920 city election,the SCLC put up Jimmy Duncan for mayor and endorsednine incumbent city councilmen, including Hesketh,Lane, and Erickson. The King County Triple Allianceendorsed the SCLC’s ticket to the dismay of Hesketh,Lane, and Erickson, who then boycotted a Duncan-formayormeeting. The Washington State Triple Alliance,which was dominated by the Washington State FederationMayor Hugh Caldwellof Labor, also did not like Duncan and refused to support its King County affiliate. Not anauspicious political start.Duncan was running for mayor against the incumbent Cecil Fitzgerald and theformer corporation counsel Hugh Caldwell. The Times set the election’s tone by ignoringDuncan and attacking the alliance as a “Red ring” seeking “minority rule” and bringing“foreign materialism” and “class rule” to Seattle. To associate the Duncan–Triple Alliancegroup with Anna Louise Strong’s General Strike proclamation, the Times referred to thealliance’s nominees as the “Who-Knows-Where-Ticket.” To assure the popular Duncan’sdefeat, the Times tried to swing Caldwell’s supporters to Cecil Fitzgerald, but Caldwellrefused to run an antiunion campaign, despite his reservations about unions. Workingagainst Duncan was also his failure to win the endorsement of the Washington StateTriple Alliance, whose farmer constituents considered him too radical; the conservativerailway unions shared their reservations. With the conservatives split over Caldwell andFitzgerald, Duncan ran just two thousand votes behind Caldwell and ahead of Fitzgeraldin the primaries. The Times and P-I then joined in support of Caldwell, while the Starremained neutral. The Times accused Duncan of wanting to establish a “Soviet form of

182 Part Fivegovernment” and claimed that he would “nationalize” women—Duncan, a church-goingprohibitionist and model family man! Caldwell defeated Duncan by 17,000 votes, althoughDuncan did pick up seven thousand more votes than he had received in the primary. Despitehis loss, Duncan’s strong showing lent encouragement to the third-party movement thenunderway.Encouraged by its showing in the city election, the SCLC voted on 14 April 1920 toaffiliate with the National Labor Party, which planned to run a full slate of candidates in thegeneral election. Four “producers’ organizations” then agreed to meet in July in Yakima:the Non-Partisan League, the Triple Alliance, the Railwaymen’s Political Club, and theCommittee of 48 (the liberal rump of the Democratic Party). They intended to agree ona joint platform and candidates as well as to decide whether to enter the Republican orDemocratic party primaries or to form an independent party.Courtesy Seattle Municipal ArchiveTwo views of theLake Union SteamPlant. The bottomconstructionscene looks northwith Fairview stillon pilings to theleft and Eastlakeon the right. Thetop scene lookssouth on Eastlakethrough themunicipal utility’scompleted plant.

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike183The Non-Partisan League and the Railwaymen’s Political Club were strongest ineastern Washington, and the Triple Alliance, which had been taken over by the WashingtonState Federation of Labor, was strongest in the western part of the state. The Committeeof 48 tried to appeal to liberal Democrats who had become discouraged with PresidentWilson’s and Governor Lister’s leadership, such as Councilman Lane, Viola Crahan ofthe Seattle Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Port of Seattle counsel Clement France.Though the organization quickly decided to skip the Democratic Party primary, WilliamShort of the State Federation of Labor argued that they should enter the Republicanprimary. Socialists and labor radicals managed to persuade others that they should form athird party. Short accepted the decision, to the dismay of Gompers and the AFL leadership.Completing the circle of defiance against the national AFL, the alliance voted to join theFarmer-Labor Party; it was joined by five other county Non-Partisan League units. RobertBridges, the port commissioner and aformer Socialist, had been barnstormingthe state for the Farmer-Labor Party andwas nominated to run for governor. TheGrange leader Elihu Bowles was namedthe candidate for lieutenant governor.Duncan was chosen to run for Congressin the First District and Clement Francefor the U.S. Senate.In spite of all the vital issues tobe debated, the issue of race dominatedthe campaign. Since the end of the war,Washington farmer groups had beenagitating for the type of anti-Japaneselegislation that California had enacted.An alien land law initiative had almostqualified for inclusion on the 1920 ballot.The Democratic Party gubernatorialcandidate, W. W. Black of Everett,attacked Bridges when he discoveredthat Bridges had leased some of his landto two Japanese farmers. In defendingthe lease as consistent with the equalityplank in his party’s platform and speakingout against exclusion legislation, Bridgeslost much farmer support and probablymuch working-class support, given theirtraditional fear of competition from cheapAsian labor. Bridges’s cause was furtherundermined when the Farmer-LaborParty’s presidential candidate came totown and argued for stricter immigrationA bit of news from The Seattle Star for 12 May, 1919announcing the planned inspection of the Skagit powersites by City Councilman Oliver T. Erickson, Acting MayorW. D. Lane, and a party of engineers.

184 Part Fivelaws. Yet Bridges garnered 121,371 votes against Governor Louis Hart’s 210,662 andBlack’s 66,079 votes. France collected 99,309 votes, 30,000 more than the better-knownDemocrat George Cotterill. The results were a promising beginning for a new party.When the war ended, City Light’s obligation to the Capital Issues Sub-Committeewas terminated as well. The department no longer needed the subcommittee’s permissionto issue bonds, and it was no longer obliged to tie in with Puget Sound Power and Light’stransmission lines.City Light’s power was generated at two locations: the Cedar River dam and theLake Union steam plant. The dam had been generating 10,000 kilowatts since December1918, despite its chronic seepage problems. After the addition of two boilers the steamplant was able to generate 20,000 kilowatts, but this power was produced by expensiveoil. Ross believed the seepage problem would never be eliminated and expected toAfter the private trolley system was made public in 1919 what Leslie Blanchard in his helpful history The StreetRailway Era in Seattle calls a “wreck epidemic” followed. Blanchard described the crash of 5 January, 1920 asits “climax . . . one of the most appalling accidents in the history of public transportation in Seattle.” Headingdowntown early in the morning with a full load of workers and shoppers, car 721 jumped the track where WoodlandPark Avenue still curves through its intersection with Thirty-ninth Street. The speeding car fell from its tracks intoa sturdy telephone pole (left of center) that opened the car roof like a can of cheap pop. Of the more than seventypassengers injured, seven were seriously so and one of these died the following day. The wreck was “appalling”because it was an accident made inevitable by the circumstances surrounding the sale of the system. The PSTP&Lsold the dilapidated line to Seattle’s mayor Ole Hanson at such an inflated price that no funds remained for repairs.At the time Mayor Hanson was more interested in whatever bold moves might make him an attractive candidate forthe American presidency. Councilman Oliver Erickson described the brakes and rails of the system as in “rottencondition.” Thomas Murphine, Mayor Hanson’s “sidekick” whom he appointed as the first public superintendentof the trolleys, described them as “in perfect shape” but said that the driver was “new and inexperienced.” Forhis part, Motorman M.R. Fullerton claimed that the brakes would not work and that “I used everything I had to tryto stop the car before reaching the curve.” Fortunately for Fullerton the evidence supported him.

abandon the masonry dam for a new one upstream atthe site of the original wooden crib dam. CouncilmanErickson disagreed with Ross, preferring to continuewith the clay puddling process to staunch the seepage.To earn Erickson’s support for the Skagit work, Rosshad to concede to Erickson, because Erickson chairedthe council’s utilities committee and contested Ross onpolicy all through the 1920s.In March 1919 Erickson persuaded the councilto deny Ross the funds for test drilling to determine thebest place for the first of the three dams Ross plannedon the Skagit. Elated, PSP&L’s Donald Barnes advisedStone and Webster that “the outlook for the dam isdubious.” On 11 March he rejoiced because a “a numberof the councilmen [are] hampering and delaying theengineering department as much as possible.” It seemedonly a matter of time before Stone and Webster couldreclaim the Skagit.The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike185Contrasting takes on the Jitney. In one—the advertisement—thePuget Sound Traction, Light and Power Co. argues for regulating thejitneys that skim away its trolley customers with cheaper fares. In theUnion Record cartoon the “Poor Old Traction Company” is parodied as acting like a grown crybaby with its jitneycomplaints. The jitney problem was long running. Both the ad and the cartoon appeared in 1916 publications.

186 Part FiveRoss finally won thecouncil’s authorization in May fortest drilling. When they determinedthat there was two hundred feetof bedrock at Gorge Creek, thecity engineer A. H. Dimock andRoss agreed that an earth-filleddam could be built there andthat permanent dams could bebuilt upstream. In Septemberthe council approved the use of$400,000 for preliminary work.Both Erickson and his loyal allyWarren Lane opposed the funding.The chamber of commerce andthe Times quickly urged aninvestigation into the feasibility ofthe project; they would continueto oppose City Light in the future.One of the Times’s themes wouldbe that City Light was sellingpower below cost and operatingat a perpetual loss. The MunicipalLeague consistently defended CityLight until 1935, as did the UnionRecord until it ceased publicationin 1928. When William RandolphHearst took over the P-I in 1921,to attract industry he convertedthe newspaper into a public powersupporter until the mid-1930s.Between June andSeptember, Ross and DimockFrom its early advocacy for public power to the 1930 victory withInitiative No. 1 providing for the condemnation of private powerfacilities in favor of public utility districts (PUDs) the Grangewas a consistent and ultimately powerful political player. Theaccompanying cartoon from the Agricultural Grange News depictsthe “power trust monopoly” as a dragon feeding on “high rates,”“Competition,” and “Undeveloped Sites” while trampling the“Truth.”persuaded the council to appropriate $1.25 million for enlarging the Lake Union steamplant. The plant was essential if Ross was to keep up with and cultivate demand while theSkagit project was moving along its rough road toward completion.As 1920 wound down, the city council authorized the sale of $2 million of utilitybonds. One million dollars was allotted for the Skagit project, and the rest would go toenlarging existing plants and sealing the Cedar River dam. It looked like clear sailingahead. But the city’s purchase of Stone and Webster’s traction system would prove anobstruction in ways never anticipated.With the state supreme court’s approval of the sale contract on 4 March, the stagewas set for the city’s takeover of the traction system on 1 April 1919. A. W. Leonardpromised to deliver 500 streetcars, 210 miles of track, an undetermined amount of real

The 1919 Shipyard Strike and the General Strike 187estate, and 3,000 employees. He insisted on keeping the power substations that wererequired to operate the trolleys. In the absence of an inventory—none accompanied thecontract—Leonard’s listing had to suffice.Three issues confronted the system’s superintendent, Thomas Murphine: raisingfunds to upgrade the system, heading off a threatened strike for higher wages and a shorterworkday, and eliminating the competition from the remaining jitney drivers. Systemimprovements were postponed, but the city council authorized higher wages to avoid thestrike; the offer fell short of the workers’ demand for an eight-hour day and overtime pay attime and a half. The council conceded both in May. Thus emboldened, the trainmen pressedfor $6.00 per day; negotiations concluded in August, when the trainmen accepted $5.25 perday. As demonstrated here, a political force of civil service employees was emerging, aforce that was strengthened when firemen and policemen joined in. This force would bepowerful in the fight over the city manager and charter revision issues of the mid-1920s andwould short-circuit Bertha K. Landes’s mayorship.Meanwhile, Mayor Caldwell was preoccupied with other concerns. Caldwell hadbeen corporation counsel at the time the purchase of the traction system was negotiated, buthe had resigned to take a commission in the army. When he won the mayoral race in March1920, Caldwell promised to investigate the transaction, fully expecting to find evidenceof fraud and bribery. If this was proven, the contract could be voided or the city could beindemnified. Caldwell began his mayorship by firing Thomas Murphine, the sidekick of theformer mayor Ole Hanson. He next asked the council to regulate the jitneys. The councilobliged, but the jitney drivers—all 185 of them—managed to get the ordinance shelvedtemporarily. In one year they would be banished for good.Nothing new was unearthed in the investigation, though at the same time noinventory could be found. The appraiser concluded that the property listed by Leonard wasworth no more than $7,843,000. The grand jury, however, found a telegram from PugetSound Traction, Power and Light to the Emergency Fleet Corporation dated 9 September1918. The telegram indicated that the EFC had manipulated the sale by refusing to takeover the traction system during wartime. “Our efforts to get consent of City Council toincrease in fare failed because of strong pro municipal ownership feeling on part of CityCouncil and people and because of antagonism to local company. Taylor and I [Appel]therefore sold street railway lines to city for fifteen million dollars.” Taylor and Appel hadin effect forced the city to purchase the traction system by leaving it no alternative. If thecity had not bought the system, the EFC would have canceled its shipbuilding contracts.From the telegram it seems that the EFC was calling the shots.The role of Walter Meier, who had succeeded Caldwell as corporation counsel,is worth attention. He contended that he had merely handled the paper of a completedtransaction. Yet no inventory was transferred, if one had actually been compiled. Meierwould later join Puget Sound Power and Light’s legal staff after running unsuccessfully formayor in 1922. He would also head the Freeholders Charter Revision Committee in 1926,which threatened J. D. Ross’s political base.The stage was now set for the dramatic contest over the next two decades betweenCity Light and Puget Sound Power and Light. While Ross focused on the Skagit project andhis alliances with other public ownership forces, PSP&L, along with its counterparts and

188 Part Fiveallies, sought to obstruct that project and to stop those who advocated public ownership—primarily the Washington State Grange. In this context Ross’s support from the MunicipalLeague proved crucial. Each time the fate of City Light’s Skagit project was threatened theLeague successfully came to its defense.The Grange had been unsuccessful in the 1924 legislative session to win passageof its public utilities district bill. Consequently it launched a successful initiative signaturecampaign which voters approved as Initiative 1 in 1930—152,487 for to 130,901 against.Public utility districts (PUDs) were established in a majority of counties throughoutthe state from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, though not without bitter opposition fromthe private power companies. The State Grange, the PUDs, and Seattle City Light foundcommon ground against PSP&L throughout the period. Each PUD in western Washingtonsought to negotiate for PSP&L electrical properties or, failing that, they sought theiracquisition through condemnation proceedings. City Light chose to negotiate and if notsuccessful the company’s fifty year franchise would terminate in 1952, at which timeit would oppose its renewal, then negotiate terms for acquisition of its Seattle electricproperties. When available the second and illustrated edition of volume 2 will cover theseproceedings, which, of course, are also covered in the original volume 2.With moves that showed the expressionist influences of American “free-form dancer” Isadora Duncan, Universityof Washington co-eds took to the campus lawn on the late afternoon of 26 May, 1920 for the annual dance pageant.“Greek statues come alive” was the classical take on the pageant. The University Orchestra accompanied thedancers, Glen Hughes, playwright and future head of the school’s drama department, designed the sets—ifneeded —and students of the school’s art department created the costumes. The price of a reserved seat for the45-minute program was a quarter and 2,000 attended in benefit for the YWCA’s on-campus services. The dancersperformed two dances—the “Four Seasons” and “Pandora’s Box.” This could be either.

EpilogueEpilogue189The abrupt decline of shipbuilding negatively affected all those auxiliary businessesrelated to it. What seems to have sustained the local economy was the notable expansionof ocean going trade once the Panama Canal became fully operational. Markets in GreatBritain and northern Europe opened up, as did those in the Gulf of Mexico and the AtlanticSeaboard. In the Pacific, trade with Japan especially resumed expansion. Alaska tradeblossomed with its fish canneries requiring machinery, tin and hardware, plus the annualresupplying of household essentials to the resident population, and the transshipment ofcanned salmon from Seattle. During the so-called boom years of the 1920s Seattle seems tohave stood largely on the sidelines, losing much of its industry while markedly expandingits commerce.Market forces set the pattern in industrial relations in the aftermath of the GeneralStrike. The open shop condition persisted throughout the 1920s, largely unaffected untilthe 1932 election victory of a revived Democratic Party that introduced the “New Deal”,bringing federal protection for unionization of workers, primarily in the form of the NationalLabor Relations Act of 1935. Most dramatic in Seattle was the successful 1934 maritimestrike that also decisively affected political alignments over the decade.Politics of the 1920s gravitated around public power, specifically City Light’sSkagit dam project and opposition to it by PSP&L, employing the great railway bondeddebt toward that end. Prohibition enforcement colored politics, highlighted by the trial ofRoy Olmstead “king of the rum runners.”The onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s introduced widespread chronicunemployment and frustrating attempts to deal with it politically. In Washington StateGovernor Clarence Martin, though a Democrat, opposed New Deal policies in providingrelief. The politics of relief displaced public ownership as the dominant issue locally. Therevival of organized labor in Seattle led the opposition to Martin. Within organized labor,left wing unions led by the maritime unions fought the Teamsters Union and its leaderDave Beck for supremacy, the latter favored by business leaders.The year 1940 marks the end of an era. Although New Deal policies failed to end theGreat Depression, gearing up for defense production and then for war succeeded in liftingthe nation from its slough. In the greater Seattle area and West Coast in general aircraftproduction especially sustained their respective economies into the postwar period.Shipbuilding has revived from its postwar slump of the 1920s, thereby contributing,along with aircraft production to a multiplier effect throughout the region. Shipbuilding inthe Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton region proved to be as ephemeral an economic factor afterWWII as it had after The Great War. (Bremerton’s yard survived because it was a Navaloperation.) Rather, it was in the aircraft industry that both Seattle and Southern Californiafound the industrial base that their business and political leaders had long sought. In thegreater Seattle area aircraft production, though subject to boom-bust cycles, was responsiblefor substantially 100,000 postwar jobs, direct and indirect.Before the war just as employment revived thousands of men were drafted intothe military, leaving huge gaps that had to be filled if production was to proceed at anemergency pace in essential lines of production. Women were systematically recruited

190 Epilogueas replacements and proved as good workers as the men they replaced. Initial resistanceby employers and labor unions was quelled once it was understood that the arrangementwas to be “only for the duration of the war.” The younger women who expected to startfamilies after the war posed less of a threat to returning veterans than older women, a highproportion of whom had been unable to find jobs during the depression. Many wished tocontinue working after the war. Having low seniority status they gravitated to lower paidjobs as practically the only opportunities available.African Americans displaced those of Japanese origin (Nikkei) as the largest nonwhiteminority. Before their evacuation under the guise of “military necessity” Nikkei hadnumbered almost 8,000 in 1942 while the number of Blacks increased from about 3,000in 1942 to over 10,000 by 1945 and 15,700 by 1950. Shipyards and longshore/maritimework provided the bulk of their employment due in large part to racially integrated CIOunions in those fields. At Boeing both the company and racist AFL unions there resistedthe entry of Blacks, who in the manufacture of aircraft numbered about 1,000 at wartimepeak. Of the many Blacks who worked in wartime industry only a few were allowed togain seniority rights.Trade unions, particularly the CIO unions, had expanded exponentially during theNew Deal years of the late 1930s. President Roosevelt owed much of his support to the CIOunions as a result of their mobilization of the mass production works (automobile, steel,rubber, coal, maritime, especially.) As a spin-off from their becoming union members theselargely second generation immigrants became politically active as well in their support ofNew Deal social reforms.Under wartime conditions, however, growth of organized labor, and the nationwidecoal strike of 1943, set the tone of opposition; it inspired passage of the 1943 Smith-ConnallyAnti-Strike Act. Also wage scales were governed by the “Little Steel Formula” therebyinhibiting collective bargaining. Released from these restraints the post-war 1946 sawallegedly the “greatest” strike wave in the nation’s history (analogous to that following TheGreat War.) Seattle’s labor actively participated. With return of the Republican control ofCongress in 1946 anti-labor bills flooded Congress, leading to passage of the Taft-HartleyAct in 1947. T-H banned the closed shop (which threatened union control of hiring halls);union leaders were required to sign affidavits disavowing Communist Party membershipor affiliation with any organization aiming to overthrow the government (potentially anyorganization appearing on the U.S. Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations).Buttressing T-H was enactment of Executive Order 9835, the Federal Loyalty Program.Together, they marked the onset of the Cold War.

A Final NoteSeattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown Through Urban Turbulence to Restoration isthe first of Richard C. Berner’s three books named together Seattle in the 20th Century. Whenthe details, stories, and insights are explored with a close reading, Berner’s accomplishmentis by far our widest opening into Seattle’s twentieth century, the first half of it, from the1900 to 1950. Those fifty years were also the second half of Seattle’s first hundred years, ifwe begin our counting with the footsteps of mid-western farmers settling here in the early1850s. Volume one was first published in 1991 by Charles Press. With this second editionwe have added many captioned illustrations, some of them copied from news reports ofthe events Berner examines, and we have almost always succeeded in placing each nextto the text it illustrates. Illustrated editions of Volume 2: Seattle 1921-1940, From Boom toBust and Volume 3: Seattle Transformed, World War 2 to Cold War will follow – but notat the moment. The collecting of illustrations and putting them in revealing order with thenarratives for Volume 2 and 3 is still a work in progress.Paul Dorpat191The aerial photograph above looks east from above the waterfront to the crests of both First Hill, andbeyond it, Second Hill marked by the twin towers of Immaculate Conception Parish, near the horizon.We include the aerial as a sign of what was in place in Pioneer Square and on First Hill on the sunnysummer day of August 11, 1950, which just makes it into the timeline of Rich Berner’s trilogy. Many ofthe structures here abide sixty years later. Examples are the Smith Tower (the tallest one), HarborviewHospital (on the hill), the Alaska Building (left-of-center). Some by 1950 have changed from theiroriginal form. The Seattle Hotel’s cornice was removed following the city’s earthquake of 1949, andsome are now gone. Again, the Seattle Hotel (the flatiron structure at the base of the Smith Tower) wasrazed in 1962 and replaced with the parking facility popularly known as the “Sinking Ship Garage.” Thebiggest interruptions to this cityscape, and not yet in place in 1950, are the Interstate Freeway, whichwas dedicated in 1967, and the Alaskan Way Viaduct, dedicated in 1953. At this writing, the latter iswaiting to be razed.

192 BibliographyBibliographyThis bibliographic listing consists only of published sources that arereadily available in libraries. Not listed are unpublished doctoral dissertationsand master’s theses and manuscripts and archival sources. Reference to them canbe found in the original three volumes. Inasmuch as relevant publications havesince been produced, they have been listed when they have been used or areparticularly relevant. The published volumes of this history should be consultedfor specific citations to manuscripts and archival sources and to theses anddissertations.Note the absence of references to publications addressing the public powermovement and its relationship to the politics of the city and state. At best thereare only passing references in books and articles to the major partisans—CityLight, Puget Sound Power and Light, J. D. Ross, Alton Leonard, Homer T.Bone, the Washington State Grange, and the public utility districts. Yet as thesevolumes make clear, the advocates of public power confronted the privateutilities throughout the decades covered. See, for example, Roger Sale, Seattle,Past to Present, and Robert Ficken and Charles LeWarne, Washington: ACentennial History. The reason for this neglect is that the records of City Lightand PSP&L were not in archival custody at the UW Library until recently (1960for City Light and 1972 for PSP&L), nor were the many other related holdingsof personal papers and corporate records. In effect these two volumes coveringthe period 1900 to 1940 (the second is in preparation) represent the nearestapproximation to a history of the public power movement in city and state.Page citations in the following bibliography are avoided in expectationthat the context will suggest where in the sources to look. Pacific NorthwestQuarterly has been abbreviated as PNQ. Listing approximates chapter sequence;it is not alphabetical by author. Short titles are used once the title has alreadybeen listed.ARCHIVAL SOURCESMuseum of History and Industry, SeattleLadies Musical Club. RecordsSeattle City Comptrollers OfficeCity Archives. Comptroller’s Records

Seattle Public LibrariesSeattle Chamber of Commerce. Minute BooksSeattle Commercial Oub. Minute BooksSeattle Public Schools ArchivesUniversity of Puget SoundHomer T. Bone. Papers (for E.V. Minich Affidavit)Bibliography193University of Washington Libraries Manuscript CollectionAmerican Institute of Architects.Seattle Chapter RecordsAmerican Protective League.Minute Men Division, SeattleEdwin G. Ames. PapersHarry E.P. Ault. PapersBroussais Beck. PapersErastus Brainerd. PapersThomas Burke. PapersHiram M. Chittenden. PapersCornish School. Records and ScrapbooksGeorge F. Cotterill. PapersBrice P. Disque. PapersFrank Fitts. PapersRobert L. Friedheim. Collection relating to Seattle General StrikeAustin E. Griffiths. PapersArthur L. Kempster. PapersRoy Kinnear. PapersKing County Central Labor Council. Records. (includes those of Se attle Central LaborCouncil)John J. McGilvra. PapersMark A. Matthews. Papers and ScrapbooksParents-Teachers Association, Seattle. RecordsPuget Sound Power and Light Company. RecordsSeattle Art Museum. RecordsSeattle Port Commission. Records (“Robert Bridges Papers”)Seattle Lighting Department. Records and Scrapbooks

194 BibliographyEugene Semple. PapersAnna Louise Strong. PapersSydney Dix Strong. PapersReginald H. Thomson. Papers and ScrapbooksUnited States Federal Trade Commission. Capital Issues Subcommit tee RecordsWashington State Federation of Labor. RecordsWashington State Federation of Women’s Clubs. RecordsHulet Wells. PapersDonald T. Williams, Jr., ‘’The Remarkable Dr. Henry Suzzallo: A Biog raphy,”(Unpublished manuscript, University of Washington Li braries. University Archives.)University of Washington Libraries Special Collections DivisionPike Place Public Market. Scrapbooks Donald Sherwood, “Description and History ofSeattle Parks”. (Un published manuscript)NEWSPAPERSFor daily coverage the Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer,and Seattle Star should be regularly consulted. For independent politicalcommentary, Harry Chadwick’s weekly Argus is both entertaining and insightful.Another weekly, the Town Crier, is predictably partisan, consistently sharing theTimes’s viewpoint. For the labor movement, the weekly Seattle Union Record ofthe Central Labor Council is essential; it competed with the Star for readership.For specific coverage of the waterfront and marine news, Railway and MarineNews is essential, though it contains disappointingly little railway news. Fromits start in 1910, the Municipal News of the Municipal League is indispensable;throughout the period the league supported City Light in its opposition toPSP&L. For the 1930s a series of leftist newspapers should be consulted:Vanguard, Voice of Action, Commonwealth Builder, Washington Commonwealth,Commonwealth News, Sunday News, Washington New Dealer, and New World.

BOOKSBibliography195SEATTLE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY; MANUFACTURING ANDFIGHT FOR CONTROL OF THE WATERFRONT; SEEDING OF THE PUBLICOWNERSHIP MOVEMENTPaul Dorpat and Genevieve McCoy, Building Washington: A History of Washington StatePublic Works, sponsors ed. (Seattle: 1998). This recent exceptional volume gives indepthcoverage of public works from the territorial period to the mid-1990s. The bookis arranged topically—for example, waterways, power, highways, roads and highways;the authors single out some counties for individual attention and sometimes provideregional coverage under each topic.Providing indispensable photographic histories of the city are Paul Dorpat’s volumes 294Glimpses of Historic Seattle: Its Neighborhoods and Neighborhood Businesses; 494More Glimpses of Historic Seattle; Seattle Now & Then, vol. 2; Seattle Now & Then,vol. 3, 2d ed.; and his film, Seattle Chronicle: A Chronology of Seattle’s Early History.Robert C. Nesbit, “He Built Seattle”: A Biography of Judge Thomas Burke (Seattle:1961).Alan Hynding, The Public Life of Eugene Semple: Promoter and Politician of the PacificNorthwest (Seattle: 1973).Roger Sale, Seattle, Past to Present (Seattle: 1976).Clarence B. Bagley, History of Seattle (Chicago: 1916).Carlos A. Schwantes, Railroad Signatures across the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: 1993).Kurt E. Armbruster, Orphan Road: The Railroad Comes to Seattle, 1853–1911 (Pullman,Wash.: 1999).Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (Lincoln, Neb.:1989).Neil H. Purvis, “History of the Lake Washington Canal,” Washington HistoricalQuarterly, 25 (April, July 1934).Robert E. Ficken, “Seattle’s Ditch: The Corps of Engineers and the Lake WashingtonShip Canal,” PNQ, 77 (January 1986).Mary McWilliams, Seattle Water Department History, 1854–1954, Operational Dataand Memoranda (Seattle: 1973).Alexander Norbert MacDonald, Distant Neighbors: A Comparative History of Seattleand Vancouver (Lincoln, Neb.: 1984).Murray Morgan, Skid Road: An Informal Portrait (Seattle: 1991).Murray Morgan, The Mill on the Boot: The Story of the St. Paul and Tacoma LumberCompany (Seattle: 1982).Thomas R. Cox, Mills and Markets: A History of the Pacific Coast Lumber Industry to1900 (Seattle: 1974).

196 BibliographyLeslie Blanchard, The Street Railway Era in Seattle: A Chronicle of Six Decades (FortyFort, Pa.: 1968).Arthur H. Dimock, Preparing the Groundwork for a City, Regrading of Seattle,Washington, American Society of Civil Engineers series, paper no. 1669 (New York:1928).V. V. Tarbill, “Mountain Moving in Seattle,” Harvard Business Review (July 1930).Reginald H. Thomson, That Man Thomson, ed. Grant Redford (Seattle: 1950).Douglas D. Anderson, Regulatory Politics and Electric Utilities: A Case Study inPolitical Economy (Boston: 1981).United States, Census of Manufacturing.David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940(Cambridge: 1990).William H. Harbaugh, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: 1963).Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (New York: 1990).George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: 1958).Samuel P. Hayes, The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago: 1957).Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement(Chicago: 1968).Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916(Cambridge, UK: 1988).Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History,1900–1916 (Chicago: 1963).Seattle Chamber of Commerce, Seattle: A Great Shipping and Commercial Center(Seattle, 1901).Seattle Chamber of Commerce, Seattle: An Industrial City (Seattle, 1916).INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS AND CITY POLITICS, 1900–1904Jonathan Dembo, Unions and Politics in Washington State, 1885–1935 (New York:1983).Carlos A. Schwantes, Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washingtonand British Columbia, 1885–1917 (Seattle: 1979).Seattle Chamber of Commerce, Semi-Centennial Celebration . . . 1903 (Seattle: 1903).Philip Taft, The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers (New York: 1970).David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York: 1989).Ronald E. Magden, A History of Seattle Waterfront Workers, 1884–1934 (Seattle: 1991).Thomas Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: Social History of IndustrialAmerica (New York: 1961).

BibliographyRobert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement(Chicago: 1968).Murray Morgan, Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle (Seattle: 1982).Roger Sale, Seattle, Past to Present (Seattle: 1976).Burton J. Hendrick, “The Recall in Seattle,” McClure’s Magazine, October 1911.Joseph F. Tripp, “Toward an Efficient and Moral Society: Washington State MinimumWage Law, 1913–1925,” PNQ, 67 (July 1976).Sharon A. Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy, Raise Hell and Sell Newspapers: AldenBlethen and the Seattle Times (Pullman, Wash.: 1996).Charles Byler, “Austin E. Griffiths: Seattle Progressive Reformer,” PNQ, 76 (January1985).Richard S. Hobbs, The Cayton Legacy: An African American Family (Pullman, Wash.:2002).Horace Roscoe Cayton, Horace Roscoe Cayton: Selected Writings, ed. Ed Diaz (Seattle:2002).197SOCIAL FABRIC OF CITY; POPULATION; PARKS, PLAYGROUNDS,BOULEVARDS; THEATER LIFE; MUSIC AND THE ARTS; PUBLIC SCHOOLSAND UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTONCalvin Schmid, Social Trends in Seattle (Seattle: 1944).Calvin Schmid and Wayne McVey, Jr., Growth and Distribution of Minority Races inSeattle, Washington (Seattle: 1964).Robert E. Wynne, Reaction to the Chinese in the Pacific Northwest and BritishColumbia, 1850–1910 (New York: 1978).Doug Chin, Seattle’s International District: The Making of a Pan-Asian AmericanCommunity (Seattle: 2002).Doug and Art Chin, Up Hill: The Settlement and Diffusion of the Chinese in Seattle(Seattle: 1973).Lew G. Kay, “Seattle Chinese,” Coast (December 1909).Rose Hum Lee, The Chinese in the United States of America (Hong Kong: 1960).Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850(Seattle: 1988).Shotaro Frank Miyamoto, Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle (Seattle:1939).Kazuo Ito, Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America (Seattle: 1973).Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans (New York, 1969).Stan Flewelling, Shirakawa: Stories from a Pacific Northwest Japanese AmericanCommunity (Auburn, Wash.: 2002).

198 BibliographyCarey McWilliams, PREJUDICE; Japanese-Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance(Boston: 1944).Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Californiaand the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (New York: 1972).Howard Droker, Historical Survey, Newsletter/Washington State Jewish HistoricalSociety, November 1972.Jean Devine, From Settlement House to Neighborhood House, 1906–1976 (Seattle:1976).Jacqueline B. Williams, The Hill with a Future: Seattle’s Capitol Hill, 1900–1946(Seattle: 2001).Molly Cone, Howard Droker, and Jacqueline Williams, Family of Strangers: Building aJewish Community in Washington State (Seattle: 2003).Mary C. Wright, ed., More Voices, More Stories: King County, Washington’s First 150Years (Seattle: 2002).Quintard Taylor, Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: 1994).Paul de Barros, Jackson Street after Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle (Seattle: 1993).Horace R. Cayton, Long Old Road: An Autobiography (Seattle: 1963).Esther Hall Mumford, Seattle’s Black Victorians, 1852–1901 (Seattle: 1980).S. Leonard Bell, “Seattle’s First Black Journalist,” 1 Sept. 1968, and “Horace R. Cayton,Jr., Man without a Race,” 27 Oct. 1968, Seattle Post-IntelligencerRichard S. Hobbs, “Horace Cayton—Seattle’s Black Pioneer Publisher,” Seattle Times,magazine, 26 Feb. 1978.Richard C. Berner, “Labor History: Sources and Perspectives,” PNQ, 60 (January 1969).Richard C. Berner, “Preserving Ethnic History,” Puget Soundings (June 1977).Robert A. Campbell, “Blacks and the Coal Mines of Western Washington, 1886–1896,”PNQ, 73 (October 1982).Bryce E. Nelson, Good Schools: The Seattle Public School System, 1901–1930 (Seattle:1988).Bryce E. Nelson, “Frank B. Cooper: Seattle’s Progressive School Superintendent,1901–22,” PNQ, 74 (October 1983).Georgia Ann Kumor, “A Question of Leadership: Thomas Franklin Kane and theUniversity of Washington, 1902–1913,” PNQ, 77 (January 1986).Charles M. Gates, The First Century at the University of Washington, 1861–1961(Seattle: 1961).Neal O. Hines, Denny’s Knoll: A History of the Metropolitan Tract of the University ofWashington (Seattle: 1980).Thomas C. McClintock, “J. Allen Smith, A Pacific Northwest Progressive,” PNQ, 53

(April 1962).BibliographyGeorge A. Frykman, “The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909,” PNQ, 53 (July1962).Norman L. Johnston, “The Olmsted Brothers and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition:‘Eternal Loveliness,’” PNQ, 75 (April 1984).Eugene C. Elliott, A History of Variety-Vaudeville in Seattle from the Beginning to 1914(Seattle: 1944).Murray Morgan, Skid Road.Roger Sale, Seattle, Past to Present.David Dilgard, Milltown Footlights: The Theaters of Everett, Washington (Everett:2001).Karen Blair, “The Seattle Ladies Musical Club, 1890–1930,” in Experiences in thePromised Land: Essays in Pacific Northwest History, ed. Thomas G. Edwards andCarlos A. Schwantes (Seattle: 1986).Esther W. Campbell, Bagpipes in the Woodwind Section: A History of the SeattleSymphony and the Women’s Association (Seattle: 1978).Ellen V. Browne and Edward N. Beck, eds., Miss Aunt Nellie: The Autobiography ofNellie C. Cornish (Seattle: 1964).Jim Kjelsen, The Mountaineers: A History (Seattle: 1998).Carsten Lien, Olympic Battleground: The Power Politics of Timber Preservation, 2d ed.(Seattle: 2000).Ben W. Twight, Organizational Values and Political Power: The Forest Service versusthe Olympic National Park (University Park, Pa.: 1983).L. A. Nelson, “The First Decade in Mountaineer Annals,” and Joseph T. Hazard, “TheSecond Ten Years,” Mountaineer, 30 (December 1937).Ruth Kirk, Sunrise to Paradise: The Story of Mount Rainier National Park (Seattle:1999).Seattle Department of Parks, Annual Report (Seattle, 1916–17).Padraic Burke, The History of the Port of Seattle (Seattle: 1976).Padraic Burke, “The Struggle for Public Ownership: Early History of the Port ofSeattle,” PNQ, 68 (April 1977).Hamilton Higday, History of the Port of Seattle, in Port of Seattle Year Book (Seattle,1914).Seattle Port Warden, Annual Report (Seattle, 1895–1920).199CITY POLITICS, 1904–12: MAYORAL ADMINISTRATIONS OF BALLINGER,MOORE, MILLER, AND GILLMurray Morgan, Skid Road.

200 BibliographyRoger Sale, Seattle, Past to Present.Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy, Raise Hell and Sell Newspapers.Dale E. Soden, The Reverend Mark Matthews: An Activist in the Progressive Era(Seattle: 2001).Dale E. Soden, “Mark Allison Matthews: Seattle’s Minister Rediscovered,” PNQ, 74(April 1983).Norman A. Clark, The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington (Seattle:1965).Jonathan Dembo, Unions and Politics in Washington.Burton Hendrick, “The Recall in Seattle.”Lee F. Pendergrass, “The Formation of a Municipal Reform Movement: The MunicipalLeague of Seattle,” PNQ, 66 (January 1975).Claudius O. Johnson, “The Adoption of the Initiative and Referendum in Washington,”PNQ, 35 (October 1944).Walton Bean, Boss Ruef’s San Francisco: The Story of the Union Labor Party, BigBusiness, and the Graft Prosecution (Berkeley: 1967).THE ECONOMY, LABOR, AND POLITICS, 1913–17, AND WARTIMEArthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York:1954).Robert E. Ficken, Lumber and Politics: The Career of Mark E. Reed (Seattle: 1979).Robert E. Ficken, “Seattle’s Ditch.”Robert E. Ficken, The Forested Land: A History of Lumbering in Western Washington(Seattle: 1987).Robert E. Ficken, “The Wobbly Horrors: Pacific Northwest Lumbermen and theIndustrial Workers of World,” Labor History, 24 (Summer 1983).Murray Morgan, Skid Road.Roger Sale, Seattle, Past to Present.Norman Clark, The Dry Years.Norman Clark, Mill Town: A Social History of Everett . . . to the Everett Massacre(Seattle: 1970).Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy, Raise Hell and Sell Newspapers.Gordon B. Dodds, Hiram Martin Chittenden: His Public Career (Lexington, Kentucky:1973).Melvin Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World(Chicago: 1969).Ronald E. Magden, Seattle Waterfront Workers.

BibliographyHarvey O’Connor, Revolution in Seattle: A Memoir (New York: 1964).Robert L. Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle: 1964).Tracy B. Strong and Helene Keyssar, Right in Her Soul: The Life of Anna Louise Strong(New York: 1983).W. Thomas White, “Railroad Labor Protest, 1894–1917,” PNQ, 75 (January 1984).Mansel G. Blackford, “Reform Politics in Seattle During the Progressive Era, 1902–1916,” PNQ, 59 (October, 1968).Neal O. Hines, Denny’s Knoll.Virgil Bogue, Plan of Seattle (Seattle: 1911).Padraic Burke, The Port of Seattle.William H. Wilson, “How Seattle Lost the Bogue Plan,” PNQ, 75 (October 1984).J. M. Neil, “Paris or New York? The Shaping of Downtown Seattle, 1903–1914,” PNQ,75 (January 1984).Douglas Anderson, Regulatory Politics.Albert F. Gunns, Civil Liberties in Crisis: The Pacific Northwest, 1917–1940 (New York:1983).Lowell S. Hawley and Ralph B. Potts, Counsel for the Damned: A Biography of GeorgeF. Vanderveer (Philadelphia: 1953).Harold M. Hyman, Soldiers and Spruce: Origins of the Loyal Legion of Loggers andLumbermen (Los Angeles: 1963).Robert L. Tyler, Rebels of the Woods: The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest (Eugene,Oreg.: 1967).William Breen, “Administrative Politics and Labor Policy in the First World War: TheU.S. Employment Service and the Seattle Labor Market Experiment,” Business HistoryReview, 61 (Winter 1987).Joan M. Jensen, The Price of Vigilance (Chicago: 1968).Emerson Hough, The Web: The Authorized History of the American Protective League(Chicago: 1919).Nancy Rockafeller, “‘In Gauze We Trust’: Public Health and Spanish Influenza on theHome Front, 1918–1919,” PNQ, 77 (July 1986).For city comparisons see:E. Kimbark MacColl, The Growth of a City: Power and Politics in Portland, Oregon,1915–1950 (Portland: 1979).Carl Abbott, Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City(Lincoln, Nebr.: 1983).Murray Morgan, Puget’s Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound(Seattle: 1979).William Issel and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and201

202 BibliographyUrban Development (Berkeley: 1986).Walton Bean, Boss Ruef’s San Francisco.Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge,Mass.: 1967).Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City: 1983).THE UNIVERSITY AND PUBLIC SCHOOLSCharles M. Gates, First Century at the University of Washington.Georgia Kumor, “A Question of Leadership: Thomas Franklin Kane and the Universityof Washington.”Jack Van de Wetering, “The Appointment of Henry Suzzallo: The University Gets aPresident,” PNQ, 50 (July 1959).George Frykman, Creating the People’s University: Washington State University, 1890–1990 (Pullman, Wash.: 1990).Bryce Nelson, Good Schools.Thomas McClintock, “J. Allen Smith.”Keith A. Murray, “The Charles Niederhauser Case: Patriotism in the Seattle Schools,”PNQ, 74 (January 1983).Tracy Strong and Helene Keyssar, Right in Her Soul.George E. Frykman, Seattle’s Historian and Promoter: The Life of Edmond S. Meany(Pullman, Wash.: 1998).SHIPYARD STRIKE TO GENERAL STRIKE AND AFTERMATHRobert Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike.Harvey O’Connor, Revolution in Seattle.Anna Louise Strong, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle: [1919]).William MacDonald, “The Seattle General Strike and Aftermath,” Nation, 10, pp.469–70.Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933(Baltimore: 1966).Maurine Weiner Greenwald, “Working Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal: TheSeattle Debate on Married Women’s Right to Work, 1914–1920,” Journal of AmericanHistory, 76 (June 1989).Jonathan Dembo, Unions and Politics in Washington.Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: 1957).Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1918–1920 (Minneapolis:1955).

Albert F. Gunns, Civil Liberties in Crisis.Philip Taft, The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers.Bibliography203THESES AND DISSERTATIONSBlackford, Mansel G. “Sources of Support for Refonn Candidates and Issues in SeattlePolitics, 1902-1916.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1967.Burke, Padraic. “The City Beautiful Movement in Seattle.” Unpub lished Master’sThesis, University of Washington, 1973.Bushue, Paul B. “Dr. Herman Titus and Socialism in Washington State, 1900-1909.”Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1967.Cline, Denzel C. ‘’The Street Car Men of Seattle: A Sociological Study.” UnpublishedMaster’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1926.Cole, Robert L. ‘’The Democratic Party in Washington State, 1919 1933: Barometer ofSocial Change.” Unpublished Ph.D. Disserta tion, University of Washington, 1972.Cravens, Hamilton. “A History of the Washington Fanner-Labor Party, 1918-1924.”Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1962.Dawson, Jan c. “A Social Gospel Portrait: The Life of Sydney Dix Strong, 1860-1938.Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1972.De Shazo, Melvin. ‘’Radical Tendencies in the Seattle Labor Movement as Reflectedin the Proceedings of its Central Body.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University ofWashington, 1925.Dembo, Jonathan. “A History of the Washington State Labor Move ment, 1885-1935.”Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 1978. (See entry above forits published version.)Dick Wesley A. ‘’The Genesis of Seattle City Light.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis,University of Washington, 1965.Doig, Ivan. ‘’John J. McGilvra: The Life and Times of an American Frontiersman, 1827-1903.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Univer sity of Washington, 1969.Gramm, Warren S. “Employer Association Development in Seattle and Vicinity.”Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Wash ington, 1948.Gunns, Albert F. “Civil Liberties and Crisis: The Status of Civil Liber ties in the PacificNorthwest, 1917-1940.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dis sertation, University of Washington,1971. (See entry above for its published version.)Hall, Margaret A. “A History of Women Faculty at the University of. Washington, 1896-1970.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Univer sity of Washington, 1984.“Henry Suzzallo and the Washington State Council of De fense.” Unpublished Master’sThesis, University of Washington, 1975. Hoffland, Laura F. “Seattle as a Metropolis:the Integration of the Puget Sound Region through the Dominance of Seattle.” UnpublishedMaster’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1933

204 BibliographyJackson, Joseph Sylvester. ‘’The Colored Marine Employees Benevolent Association ofthe Pacific, 1921-1934.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1939.Jones, George Michael. “Longshore Unionism on Puget Sound: Se attie-TacomaComparison.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Univer sity of Washington, 1957.Kimmons, Neil C. ‘’The Historical Development of Seattle as a Metro politan Area.”Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Wash ington, 1942.Kumor, Georgia Ann. ‘’Thomas Franklin Kane and the University of Washington, 1902-1913.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1981.Lechner, Anna Bell. ‘’The Seattle Municipal Street Railway.” Unpub lished Master’sThesis, University of Washington, 1936.Livingston, Victoria H. “Erastus Brainerd: The Bankruptcy of Bril liance.” UnpublishedMaster’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1967.MacDonald, Alexander Norbert. “Seattle’s Economic Development, 1880-1910.”Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wash ington, 1959.McOintock, Thomas C. “J. Allen Smith and the Progressive Move ment: A Study inIntellectual History.” Unpublished Ph.D. Disser tation, University of Washington, 1959.Miller, Virginia. ‘’The Development of Leisure Time Activities in Se attle, 1851-1910.”Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1972.Moe, Ole K. “An Analytical Study of the Foreign Trade Through the Port of Seattle.”Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Wash ington, 1932.Murayama, Yuzo. ‘’The Economic History of Japanese Immigration to the PacificNorthwest: 1890-1920.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington,1982.Murray, Keith A. “Republican Party Politics in Washington During the Progressive Era.”Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 1946.Nelson, Bryce E. “Good Schools: The Development of Public School ing in Seattle,1901-1922. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Univer sity of Washington, 1981.Nishinori, John I. “Japanese Farms in Washington.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis,University of Washington, 1926.O’Connell, Mary Joan. ‘’The Seattle Union Record, 1918-1928: A Pio neer Labor Daily.Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1964.Ogle, Stephanie Francine. “Anna Louise Strong: Progressive and Pro pagandist.”Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wash ington, 1981.Pendergrass, Lee Forrest. ‘’Urban Reform and Voluntary Association: A Case Studyof the Seattle Municipal League.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University ofWashington, 1972.Pullen, Douglas R. ‘’The Administration of Washington State Gover nor Louis F. Hart,1919-1925.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 1974.Purdy, Harry. ‘’Development and Cost of Municipal Operation of the Seattle StreetRailways.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1928.

BibliographyRademaker, John A. ‘’The Ecological Position of the Japanese Farmers in the State ofWashington.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Uni versity of Washington, 1939.Reiff, Janice L. “Urbanization and the Social Structure: Seattle, Wash ington, 1852-1910.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 1981.Roe, Nellie. “Italian Immigrants in Seattle.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Universityof Washington, 1915. Saltvig, Robert D. ‘’The Progressive Movement in Washington.”Un published Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 1966.Sharbach, Sarah Ellen. “Louise Olivereau and the Seattle Radical Community, 1917-1923.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 1986.Soden, Dale E. “Mark Allison Matthews: Seattle’s Southern Preacher.” UnpublishedPh.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 1980. Sparks, William O. “J. D. Rossand Seattle City Light, 1917-1932.” Un published Master’s Thesis, University ofWashington, 1964.Tattersall, James N. ‘’The Economic Development of the Pacific North west to 1920.”Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wash ington, 1960.Thompson, Margaret Jane. “Development and Comparison of Indus trial Relationships inSeattle.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Uni versity of Washington, 1929.Tripp, Joseph F. “Progressive Labor Laws in Washington, 1900-1925.” UnpublishedPh.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 1973.Westine, Carl G. ‘’The Seattle Teamsters.” Unpublished Master’s The sis, University ofWashington, 1937.White, William Thomas.” A History of Railroad Workers in the Pacific Northwest.”Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wash ington, 1981.Winslow, Barbara. ‘’The Decline of Socialism in Washington, 19101925.” UnpublishedMaster’s Thesis, University of-Washington,Wynne, Robert E. “Reaction to the Chinese in the Pacific Northwest and BritishColumbia: 1850-1910.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington,1964.205

206 IndexIndexAAfrican Americans in Seattle (see:Blacks in Seattle)Alaska Steamship Company 43, 120Alaskan trade 4-6, 15, 29, 32, 43, 64, 84,91, 94, 120, 189Alaska-Yukon-Pacific-Exposition 50Alki Beach 46, 48-49American Craftsmen and Workmen(ACW) 176, 179American Association of UniversityProfessors 126American Federation of Art 59American Institute of Architects 82American Legion 179“American Plan” 2, 171, 177, 179American Protective League 146Ames (Edgar) Shipbuiding Company130, 140Ames, Edwin G. 139Anti-conscription 148Antipicketing bill 116, 125“Anti-red” city ordinance 173Antisyndicalist legislation 132, 163,173, 175Argus, The 21-23, 29, 31, 35, 38, 47,67-68, 73, 85, 88, 142, 170Arms, Richard 74, 76Army Corps of Engineers 78Ashkenazim 41Associated Industries of Seattle 102,103, 165, 176Ault, Harry (see also Union Record) 27,164, 175, 180Ayers, R. F. 85-88BBackus, Manson F. 152Ballard 18, 36, 38, 60-61, 74, 76, 79,114, 154Ballinger, Richard A. 32, 67Ballinger-Pinchot controversy 29, 64Bannick, Claude 75, 96, 99Barnes, Donald 177, 180, 185Bebb, Charles 149Beck, Broussais 176Beckingham, Charles 138, 141Beede, George K. 47, 52Belt line railroad 113Bickford A. C. 176, 178Beilaski, A. Bruce 146Billingsley, Fred and Logan 117Black, W. W. 183Blackman, William 25, 121Blacks in Seattle 42-43, 118-119Blethen, Alden J. (see also SeattleTimes) 64-65, 67, 72, 86, 96-97, 128Blethen, Clarence 176, 179Blethen, Joseph 19Boeing Airplane Company 190-191Boeing, William E. 116Bogue Plan 16, 77-78, 80, 82-90Bogue, Virgil 77, 82, 89“Bolsheviks” 141, 169Bolton, Frederick E. 127-128Bolton, Thomas H. 157, 178Bon Marché 28, 105, 176Bone, Scott 86, 88Bootlegging (see Prohibition)Boston Syndicate 25Bouillion, A.V. 69

Boulevards 49-50, 82Bowles, Elihu 183Bradford, James 142Bradlee, Henry 156Brainerd, Erastus 15-16, 73-74Bridges, Robert 86-88, 149, 183-184Briggs, Albert 146-147British Columbia 4, 94-95, 104British Columbia Electric RailwayCompany 104Brown, J. G. 138Bruce, James 173Burke, Thomas 10-15, 21, 29, 38, 86-87,110, 119, 149, 181Bush, Irving 87Bush Terminals Company 85-87Businessmen and Reform 102Butchers union 144Butler, Nicholas Murray 127CCady, Calvin B. 59Caldwell, Hugh 181-182, 187Calhoun, Scott 85-87Camp Lewis 141Candy and Cracker Workers Union 144Card and Label League 105, 116, 131,148Cayton, Horace R. 31, 43-44Cayton, Susie Revels 43Cecil, George 151Cedar River dam 22, 151, 184, 186Central Labor Council 3, 29-30, 40, 103,109-110, 119, 128, 132, 137-138, 140,142-143, 147-148, 157, 170, 173-176,181Index207Central School 35, 40Centralia Massacre 180Certificate-of-necessity legislation 24,125Chadwick, Harry 18-19, 21, 23, 29-30,32, 46, 48, 67-68, 73, 85, 88, 155-158Child’s Welfare Exhibit 107Chimes controversy, University ofWashington 64-65, 75Chin Gee Hee 38-39Chinatown 38-39Chinese in Seattle 38-39Chittenden, Hiram M. 78-81, 85-88, 93Chittenden (Hiram) Locks 79Churchill, Martha Blanka 42Citizens’ Alliance 56City manager form of government 72City Party 68Civic Plans Investigating Committee 82Civil Liberties 3, 91, 102, 142, 145-147,172Clark, Norman H. 110-111, 116, 122Clean City Organization 70Closed shop 2, 25-26, 91, 101-103, 145,177, 179, 190-191Clubs, elitist 1, 84Coal mining 25Coal trade 5-6, 13, 16, 21, 25, 29, 35,38, 43, 64, 103, 178, 190-191, 196Cobb (John C.) Building 77, 84Collins Playfield 41, 51Colman, Laurence 73Commerce (general) 5, 10, 84, 89, 189Commerce, waterborne (general) (seealso: Port of Seattle) 1, 5, 93, 114, 141Committee of Forty-Eight (see also:Triple Alliance) 182-183

208 IndexCompany unions (see also: LoyalLegion of Loggers and Lumbermen)177-178Conservation movement 3Considine, John 31, 52-53, 55-56Cooper, Frank B. 2-3, 60, 62, 129, 173Cooperative Food Products Association144, 161Cornish, Nellie 58-59Cornish Realty Company 59Cornish School 57-59Cort, John 46-47Cotterill, George F. 30, 46, 72, 75, 84-85, 89, 95-101, 104-105, 107-108, 184County-City Building 89Cox, David H. 76Crahan, Viola G. 131, 183Crystal Theater 53Cudihee Edward 47Curtis, Asahel 83, 89Cushman dam site (see: Lake Cushmandam site) 111-112, 151DDaggett, Stuart 17Dakota, S. S.5, 7, 114Daniels, Josephus 97-98“Deadline” (see also Vice operations,and Seattle Police Department) 30-31,52, 67-68Democratic Party 170, 181-183, 189Denny, Arthur A. 13Denny, David 45Denny Park 45Deportations 35, 147, 163, 173Diaz, Ed 31Dilling, George W. 74-77, 95Dimock, Arthur H. 111, 186Direct Legislation League 68Direct primary threatened 125Disque, Brice 138-140Dollar, Robert 119-120Donworth, George 162Douglas, John F. 77, 83-84Dreamland Dancehall/Pavillion 69-70,104-105, 119, 133, 168“Dry Squad” (see under: Seattle PoliceDepartment) 116-117, 142Duncan, James A. 29-30, 110, 164, 166,169-170, 181-183, 188“Duncanites” in Central Labor Council173-175, 181Duwamish area waterway 15, 17, 40,45-47, 50, 79-80, 85, 89, 92, 115EEast waterway terminals 14-15, 89Economy (general) 1, 4, 6-7, 16, 22, 70,72, 84, 91, 95, 118, 127, 162, 189Edwards, Frank 156Eight-hour statute 27, 136-140, 145,150, 187Electric power (see: Cedar River dam;Puget Sound Traction, Seattle CityLight, Seattle Electric Company, Stoneand Webster Management Corporation)19, 22, 81, 112, 161Electric utility regulation, rates 22-23,76, 81, 114Electrical workers (see: InternationalBrotherhood of Electrical Workers)103-104, 136, 161Employers’ Association of Seattle 108,118, 143, 176

Employers’ Association of Washington102-104, 116, 133Employment agencies, for fee 107Equity Printing Plant 173Erickson, Oliver 72, 76, 111-112, 151,155, 178, 181, 183-186Espionage Act 149, 180Espionage, labor (see: Labor espionage)146European trade 91, 94-95, 135, 189Everett Commercial Club 122“Everett Massacre” 118, 121-124, 132FFarmer-Labor Party 183Farmers, Trade with 44, 183Farrell, J. D. 12, 66Federation of Womens’ Clubs of Seattle62, 69, 74, 107, 128, 131, 183Federation of Womens’ Clubs ofWashington 2-3, 27, 43, 90, 125Ferries 11, 45-46, 48First African Methodist EpiscopalChurch 43First Presbyterian Church 36, 69Fisher Flouring Mill 92Fitzgerald, Cecil B. 157, 181France, C. J. 72, 183-184Franchises 3, 11, 18, 20, 71, 90Freeholders 108-109, 187Freeman, Miller (see also: Town Crier)69, 85Fremont Bridge 153, 155Friedheim, Robert 160-161, 164Frye Packing Company 136, 144, 175Furth, Jacob 20-22, 28, 40Furuya, Masajiro 40Index 209GGalbraith, John K. 1General Strike 2, 40, 95, 102, 132, 138-139, 144-145, 148, 150, 153, 158-159General Strike Committee 161, 164, 173Georgetown 37, 44, 77, 103, 134-135Gerald, Clarence 72-75Gill, Hiram 64, 67, 69-74, 90, 96, 101,105-108, 112, 117, 119, 124, 134, 141-143, 151, 154Globe Transfer Company 104Gold Rushes, effects of, Klondike,Shusanna district 15, 22-23, 42, 52,135, 143Gompers, Samuel 138-139, 145, 160,183Gould, A. Warren 82Grambs, W. J.104Grand Opera House 52, 55, 58, 73Grange, State (see also: JointLegislative Committee) 2, 81, 110, 116,188, 192Graves, Franklin P. 63Great Northern Railroad 4, 10Green, Joshua 37, 117, 131Green, Leon 161, 166Greene, Henry 141Griffiths, Austin E. 72, 108Gross, William 42-43Gunns, Albert F. 147HHadley, Henry K. 58-59Hanford, Cornelius 12, 74Hanson, Ole 142, 152-156, 158, 164,166, 168-173, 184, 187

210 IndexHarbor Island controversy 16, 77-78,83-92, 95-96, 112Hart, Joseph K. 127-128Hartley, Roland Hill 127, 140Harvard Club 132Hay, Marion 65Hearst, William Randolph 186Hebb dam site 111, 151Hebrew Benevolent Association 42Hendrick, Burton J. 29, 70-71, 73Henry (Horace C.) Building 77, 83Hesketh, Robert B. 157, 178, 181Hill, James J.11, 15-18, 29-30Hillside Improvement Corporation 73Hinterland trade 4-5Hiring hall control (longshoremen) 145,176Hobbs, Richard 31Hoge, James D. 31Holladay, Ben 16Holland, Ernest O. 126Home Rule (see also: Public ownershipmovement), threatened 3, 67, 76, 114-115, 125Horse racing 47Houston, David 151Humes, Thomas J. 29-32, 67Humphries, John 96, 99, 101, 104Hurley, Edward 150-151Hyman, Harold 139IIndustrial Relations Committee (re:General Strike) 162Industrial unionism (see also: JamesDuncan) 173-174Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)98, 122Influenza Epidemic 150Insull, Samuel 24, 147International Brotherhood of ElectricalWorkers 103, 136, 161International Longshoremen’sAssociation 27, 119, 144-145, 176Irving, Joe 123-124Issaquah 5Italians in Seattle 35, 40, 44, 173JJapan (see: Commerce, trade with Japan;Oriental trade) 5, 94-95Japantown 39, 41Japanese Chamber of Commerce 40Jarvis, John 96Jews in Seattle 40-41Jitneys 115, 134, 185, 187Joint Legislative Committee 110, 116Jones, Wesley C. 12, 153KKane, Thomas F. 63, 65, 107Katzenjammer kastle 34-35, 89Kegrize, Michael 58Kempster, Arthur L. 91-92, 103-105,115-116, 135-136, 170, 175, 177Kerrigan, H.W. 104King, James 173King Street Station 18, 21Klaw and Erlinger 52-53, 84Klondike gold rush 135Knights of Labor 27

LLabor contractors 39Labor espionage 146Labor legislation 90, 107Ladies’ Musical Club 56, 58Lake Cushman dam site 111-112, 151Lake Washington Boulevard 49Lake Washington Canal 79Lake Washington Canal Association 79Lake Washington Waterway/Ship Canal14-15Landes, Bertha K. 187Landes, Henry 111, 125Lane, Warren D. 149, 155, 172, 178,181, 183, 186Laundry Owners’ Association/Club 131,144Laundry workers 131, 136, 144Leonard, Alton W. 103-104, 134-135,152, 154-158, 186-187Leschi Park 31-32Library, Seattle Public 36, 41, 51Lichtenberg, I. J. 12“Liberty Hotel” 106-107Lister, Ernest 65, 99, 115, 117, 119, 124,126-127, 132-133, 135, 138, 168Listman, George 173, 179-181Lois Theater 53, 56Longshoremen 27, 119, 121, 138, 144,170, 176Lord, Alice 131, 137Loyal Legion of Loggers andLumbermen 139Lull, Herbert G. 127-128Lumber mills/ workers 39, 79, 137, 139Lumber mills/ trade 4, 8, 10, 95Lumberman’s Club 84Luna Park 17, 45-46, 48Lundin, Alfred H. 101Index211MMacintosh, Kenneth 106Macy, V. Everit 149Madison Park 32, 45-49Madrona Park 32, 46-50Magden, Ronald 119-120Main Street School 40-41Manufacturing 7, 9, 79-80, 95Marine Cooks and Stewards Association43Maritime workers 7, 27, 119, 121, 189-191Marquett, Jack 118Marsh, Ernest 123Master Builders’ Association 178Matthews, Mark A. 36, 69, 71-72,74,105, 117, 162, 164McGilvra, John J. 13, 46McGrath, William H. 152McGraw, John H. 12-14, 78McMahon, Teresa and Edward 64, 127”McNulty-Reid”, (factions in IBEW)103-104McRae, Donald 122-124Mead, Albert E. 18, 47-48, 66, 84Meadows racetrack 47-48Meat Packers Union 136Meier, Walter 187Meredith, William L.30-31, 53Metal Trades Association 118, 160Metal Trades Council 149-150, 160,170-171, 175, 181

212 IndexMetropolitan Building Company 77,83-84Metropolitan Theater 52, 54-56, 84Metropolitan Tract of the University ofWashington 52, 60, 77-78, 83, 89Military training in schools 128Miller, Alfred E. 160Miller, Annie 97Miller, John F. 68-69Minimum wage 21, 107Minich, Earl V. 157Ministerial Federation 2-3, 67, 70, 96,142, 162Minnesota, S.S. 5, 7, 114Minute Men 129, 140, 145-147, 149,177Mooney, Tom (defense of) 133, 148,160-161, 172-173, 175Mooney, Rena 148Moore, James A. 21, 35, 37, 78-79, 83-84Moore Theater 52, 55-56, 58, 96, 101,146Moore, William Hickman 67-69Moran Brothers Shipyard 8Moran, Robert 9, 42-43Morgan, Murray 53, 55, 72Morrison, John 170Mosquito Fleet 4-6, 118, 131Mount Rainier National Park 3, 98Mount Zion Baptist Church 43Mountaineers, The 3Mumford, Esther 31, 43Municipal League 2, 71-72, 82, 88, 90-91, 107, 109, 112, 119-120, 125, 128,133-134, 142, 149, 152, 166, 186, 188Municipal News 88, 120Municipal ownership 18, 21-22, 24, 63,67-70, 76, 85, 125, 142, 187Municipal Ownership League 22Municipal Ownership Party 66-68Municipal Plans Commission 77, 82Murphine, Thomas 156-158, 184, 187Mutual Laundry 144NNational Association of Manufacturers102, 177National Electric Light Association 24,76, 115Nelson, Bryce E. 60, 157, 176Neterer, Jeremiah 120, 180New Deal 2-4, 137, 189-191Niederhauser, Charles 173Non-Partisan League 66, 149, 182-183North End Federated Clubs 21Northern Pacific Railroad 1, 4, 13, 52Northern Securities Company 1, 17-18Northwest Stevedores and Trucking 121,145Nye, David E. 19OO’Connor, Harvey 164, 171Ogle, Stephanie 164Oil, vegetable trade 95Olivereau, Louise 140Olmsted Brothers 30, 48-50Olmsted, John C. 49, 82, 89Olympic National Park 3Olympic National Park controversy 3One Big Union 175

Open shop 2-3, 25-27, 71, 91, 101-105,119, 132, 142, 160-161, 171, 175-180,189Open shop movement 142, 173, 175-176Open town policy 29-30, 67, 72, 90Oregon Steam Navigation Company 16Oregon-Washington Railway andNavigation Company 92Oregonian 74Orpheum Theater circuit 53PPacific Coast Company 6-7Pacific Coast Steamship Company 6, 27,43, 119-120, 140Pacific Coast Utilities Association 103-104Pacific Gas and Electric Company 104Pacific Mail Line 16, 114Pacific School 40Pacific Terminal Company 87-88Pacifism 149Padelford, Frederick 63Palace Fish 41Palm Garden 52Panama Canal 1, 16, 71, 84, 91, 94, 112-114, 189Pantages, Alexander 43, 53, 55-56Pantages Theater 53Parent-Teacher Association 65, 128Parker, Carleton 128, 139, 145, 149Parry, Will H. 29Patterson, John V. 118Pekin Restaurant 38, 40Philippine Islands, trade with 5Phillips, Kevin 1Index 213Phinney, Guy 46Piez, Charles 150, 159-171Piggott Printing Plant raid 143-144Pike Place Public Market 44Piles, Samuel 181Planning, urban 72Playgrounds 49-51, 72, 82Politics 1, 16-17, 24, 31-32, 65-67, 90-91, 107, 114, 189Politics—reform coalition 90Population characteristics 3, 7, 9, 32-35,37-40, 60, 91, 94, 107, 147, 189Populist Party 1, 17, 27, 30, 38, 49Port of Seattle 1, 38, 72, 77-78, 85-89,93-94, 113, 115, 119, 183Portland Railway, Light, and PowerCompany 104Potlatch Riot 98-99, 104-105, 128, 142Pratt, Frederick W. 156Profanity Hill 34-35Prohibition 67, 110, 116, 124-125, 189Public ownership movement 2Public Welfare League 66, 70, 73-74Puget Sound Power and Light Company76Puget Sound Steamshipmen’s Union118Puget Sound Traction, Power and LightCompany 21, 76, 91, 102, 111, 134,150-151, 157, 185, 187Puget Sound Navigation Company 117-119, 131QQueen City Good Roads Club 46

214 IndexRRacism 35-39, 62, 121, 183, 190-191Railroads 3, 5m 15-17, 25, 34, 38, 43,113-114Railroads—regulation 31Railway and Marine News 6, 26, 79, 89,113, 121Railwaymen’s Political Club 182-183Reames, Clarence 145-147Recall election 29, 74Red Cross, American 146Red News Wagon 96, 98Refernda, campaign of 68, 124-125Regrading 18, 22, 45, 52, 60, 82-83, 97,106Renick, Frank H. 115, 125Renton 103, 106Republican Party 29, 44, 181Revenue bonds 22Rhodes, A. J. 164, 176Riplinger, John 67Roberts, Milnor 111Rockefeller, John D. 177Rodgers, David 118, 162Ronald, James T. 106, 124, 180Roosevelt, Theodore 1, 64, 74, 190-191Rosene, John 5Ross, Helen 107Ross, James D. 23, 72, 76-77, 81, 91,100, 109, 111-114, 150-153, 156, 161,184-188, 192Roston, James 121Rowan, James 122Russian Revolution, effects/influenceof140, 143, 148Russian Workers Council of Seattle 148SSackett, Martha 59Sadler, Kate 147-148Sailors’ Union of the Pacific 27St. Germain Bakery case 136, 178Salmon fisheries and trade 5, 91, 93-94,189San Francisco, rivalry with 3, 33-34, 41,47, 53, 56, 59, 71, 84, 86, 89, 103, 113,119, 133, 148, 150, 153Saunders, Robert 179-180Schwabacher Brothers 4, 41Schwargerl, E.O. 45Scientific management 62-63, 126Seamen’s Act 114Seattle and Lake Washington WaterwayCompany 14Seattle Cedar Mill 38Seattle Censor Board 118Seattle Central Labor Council 29, 90,104, 160Seattle Chamber of Commerce 38, 40,138Seattle Charter Revision Committee109, 187Seattle City Council 2, 76Seattle City Light 76, 90, 188Seattle Civil Service Commission 109,173Seattle Commercial Club 70, 82, 85,112, 122, 142Seattle Construction and Dry DockCompany 9, 95, 118, 130Seattle Council of Jewish Women 41Seattle Electric Company 2, 21-28, 40,46, 48, 50, 63, 68, 74, 76-77, 91, 103Seattle Engineering Department 185

Seattle Fine Arts Society 59-60Seattle Manufacturers Association 18,22, 26, 28Seattle Park Commission 45, 50Seattle Police Department 31, 67-68, 99,109, 116Seattle Port Commission 80, 95Seattle Post-Intelligencer 14, 16, 56-57,79, 87, 101, 112-113Seattle Public Schools 2-3, 41, 60-62,107, 128-129Seattle Republican 31, 43Seattle School Board 61-62, 108, 128-129, 149, 173, 180-181Seattle Star 68, 118, 126, 141, 159, 166-169, 183Seattle Sun 97, 127Seattle Symphony 57-58Seattle Theater 52Seattle Times 18-19, 26, 64-65, 75, 97,100, 142Seattle Union Record 27, 120Seattle Waterfront Federation [ofUnions] 119Selvin, Edwin 181Semple, Eugene 12-15Sephardim 41“Sergeant Wallace” 97, 100Settlement House 41Seward Park 46, 49“Shilka” incident 140-142Shipbuilding 8-9, 14, 95, 130-131, 149-150, 153, 159-162, 187, 189-190Shipyard workers 95, 118, 135-137,149-153, 155, 158Shorrock, Ebenezer 181Short, William 147, 160, 175-176, 180,183Index 215Silk trade 5, 7, 94-95Skagit Power Company 72, 151-152,183Skagit River dam site 91, 110, 150-151,154Skinner, David E. 9, 116, 130, 152, 160,162, 165, 177Skinner and Eddy shipyard 95, 130, 150,152, 159Smith Cove 7, 12-13, 50, 89, 93-94, 113Smith, J. Allen 20, 63-64, 72, 125, 127-128Smith, (L. C.) Building / Tower 66, 81-82, 89, 105Smith, Walker C. 173Snoqualmie Falls Power Company 22Socialist Daily Call 144Socialist Party of Washington 27, 67, 96,99, 172Soldiers and Sailors Council 177South Park 37, 44Spangler, James 162, 164, 166Spargur, John 57, 59Standard Furniture Company 41-42, 89,176, 179State Labor Congress 27Stevens, John F. 15, 49Stimson Mill Company 36Stone and Webster ManagementCorporation 2, 20, 23, 25, 76, 103, 112,134, 153, 155-156, 170, 175, 177, 180,185Street railways 19-20, 66, 153-154Strikebreaking 40Strong, Anna Louise 107, 129, 144, 149-150, 164, 171, 175, 179Strong, Sydney Dix 72, 149-150Stuart (E. A.) Building 77, 84

216 IndexSunset Falls dam site 151, 153Suzuki Company 94Suzzallo, Henry 125-128, 135, 139-140,163, 168, 173TTacoma, rivalry/comparison with 4, 8,32, 53, 86, 88, 92, 144, 162, 179-180Taylor, A.Merritt 155Taylor, Howard 115Taylor, James 159Teachers, women 61Teachers, working conditions of 60-62,129Team Owners’ Association 104Teamsters Union104-107, 136, 144, 170,175, 189Telephone workers 131, 136-137, 184Theater entertainment 56Thomson, Reginald H. 18-19, 22-23, 67,72, 80-82, 85, 87, 95, 100, 111-112,153-154Tidelands 13, 17, 85, 87, 135Todd, Elmer E. 109Town Crier 40, 52, 60, 69-70, 85, 87-88,106-107, 112, 142, 152, 170, 172Trade Unions 178, 190-191Trainmen’s Union 28Triple Alliance 175, 178, 180-183Tupper, Gideon 72-75Tyler, Robert 139UUnemployment 3, 106, 177, 189Union Record 27, 89, 119-120, 136,142-144, 152, 160, 164, 166, 170, 172,175-176, 179-181, 185-186Union shop 28, 178Union Station 1, 18United Mine Workers 101U.S. Army 129U.S. Emergency Fleet Corporation 95,131, 149, 151, 155, 159, 163, 187U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation146U.S. Federal Trade Commission 151U.S. Forest Service 3, 64, 151U.S. Industrial Relations Commission106U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission17-18, 102, 113U.S. Justice Department 145-146, 149U.S. Railroad Administration 176U.S Shipbuilding Labor AdjustmentBoard 149-150, 153, 159-160U.S. Shipping Board 95, 131, 140, 144,149-151, 154-155, 165, 174, 177U.S. War Department, SpruceProduction Division 138-139, 153, 168University of Washington 2, 20, 44, 50,53, 63-65, 77, 107, 125-127, 152, 179,188University of Washington Daily 65University of Washington’sMetropolitan Tract 53-54, 60, 77-78,83, 89Urban League of Seattle 43VVanderveer, George F. 124, 148, 173Vaudeville 46, 51-56Vice operations 67, 73, 96Vigilantism 3, 38, 140, 147-148, 181

WWaitresses Union 131, 137Wappenstein, Charles 68, 72-75Wardall, Max 73Warren, Joel 141, 143, 172-173Washington Park 46, 50Washington Political Bureau 66Washington Power and TransmissionCompany 22Washington State Bar Association 101Washington State College 126Washington (State) Defense Council128, 135, 138-139, 145, 163, 168Washington (State) EducationalSurvey Commission 126Washington State Federation of Labor27, 29, 116, 123, 142, 147-148, 160,173, 175, 181, 183Washington State Federation ofWomen’s Clubs 2-3, 27, 43, 90, 125Washington (State) Harbor LinesCommission 12Washington (State) Legislature 11, 50,62-63, 76, 79, 113, 156, 163Washington (State) Public ServiceCommission 24, 71, 76, 96, 113-115Washington (State) RailroadCommission 18, 24, 66, 71Washington (State) Supreme Court 12,14-16, 22, 84, 136, 153, 156, 186Washington Water Power Company 104Water supply (city) 2, 18-19Waterfront 1, 4, 6, 9-10, 13-17, 20-21,36, 85-86, 93, 113, 119, 122, -123,130, 144-147, 174, 176Waterfront Employers’ Union/Association 120, 144, 176Waterhouse, Frank 119, 174, 176, 181Index217Wells, Hulet 96, 100-101, 124, 148, 161,170-171West, Harry 58West Waterway 15Western Central Labor Union 27, 29Wharfage rates 1, 16, 18, 84, 113, 115White (Chester) Building 77, 83White, Henry 119, 147, 172-173Whiting, Robert 157Whitworth, Frederick H. 19Wilson, John L. 29Wilson, Woodrow 132, 145, 147, 170,177Winsor, Richard 108, 128“Winston v. Spokane” case 22Women’s clubs 2-3, 17, 41, 43, 62, 69,74, 90, 107, 125, 128-131, 183Woodland Park 45-47, 50, 184Workman’s Compensation Bill 71YYoung Women’s Christian Association54, 188Younger, C. H. 163