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

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