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

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