NORTHWEST WORKER (EVERETT)
NORTHWEST WORKER DEVOTED TO THE INDUSTRIAL, POLITICAL, AND EDUCATIONAL ADVANCEMENT OF THE WORKING CLASS [i]
“I’m dying, boys, but don’t give up. Lift me up. I want to sing the ‘Red Flag’ again,” said Abraham Robinowitz. As his name indicates, he belonged to the race long without a flag. Who will deny him one in death? He was shot in the back of the head by a high-power rifle bullet. Trying to sing, he breathed his last in the arms of his friend—himself an earnest-faced lad of 18 years. He too, was hit in the back by a spent rifle bullet. Is the lad or the man who fired from ambush, the more dangerous character? …[ii] Abraham Robinowitz was one of the five Wobblieskilled in the Everett Massacre ... from a shortarticle in the aftermath of the massacre.Northwest Worker, November 23, 1916
The second decade of the 20th century was a period of intense and often violent labor struggles in the United States, and the young but fast-growing city of Everett in Snohomish County, Washington came to symbolize this dramatic violence due to one event—the “Everett Massacre” of November 5, 1916. Much has since been written of this incident in which seven men are known to have died and 47 were wounded. The city’s three newspapers—two traditional and conservation dailies, the Everett Morning Tribune and the Everett Daily Herald, and the Socialist weekly, the Northwest Worker, are primary sources on the "massacre." Microfilm collections of the two dailies for this period are complete; however, the Northwest Worker collection is regrettably missing three issues before and two immediately after the tragedy. Nevertheless, the Northwest Worker offers valuable insight from a Socialist perspective into the events leading up to and following November 5, 1916. The Northwest Worker and its never-ending financial difficulties was also a drama unto itself, as were the finances of the two Everett Socialist newspapers that preceded it and the one that followed. (see Lineage) The name change to the Northwest Worker was one of several attempts by the newspapers’ editors to expand the financial base and political horizons of the publications. A NEW MOVE Owing to the extension of our activities to the states of Idaho and Oregon, and for other reasons, the Washington Socialist board of control unanimously decided to change the name of the paper to the Northwest Worker. We hope our readers will work as hard for the paper under its new name as they did under the old. The field open to us is large; has only just been scratched; and if everyone will do his or her best during the next twelve months we shall put a kink in the ranks of the old parties that their hope of retaining their power in the law mills of these states, will have gone forever. [iii] All four newspapers shared a basic struggle for financial survival that kept them constantly on the brink of collapse. Finances were a strain for the papers despite the fairly strong popularity at that time of Socialism in Snohomish County and throughout the Pacific Northwest. [iv] Socialism, however, appealed primarily to the poorly paid working classes, and what little commercial advertising the papers did carry was placed by the small businesses that catered to the people who worked in Everett’s booming timber-based economy.
Socialist strength in the county, as measured by electoral returns, reached its zenith in the Presidential election of 1912 when Socialist Presidential Candidate Eugene V. Debs trailed only Theodore Roosevelt who ran on the Bull Moose, Progressive Party ticket. Debs beat Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the ultimate winner nationally. Almost two years later, in August 1914, Everett Socialists were successful in electing Socialist James Salter to the three-person commission that ran the city. [vii] Serving out an unexpired term following the recall of the previous commissioner, [viii] Salter had to run for reelection a year later and the Northwest Worker focused heavily on this campaign. Actually, Salter, hand-in-hand with the Socialist weekly, had never really stopped campaigning from his original election, due no doubt to the proximity of the next election, and due also to the need for Salter and all Socialists to prove their administrative competency to the doubting majority, and perhaps to themselves too. The official reelection campaign got underway in earnest on September 2, 1915, when beneath the headline “The City Elections – Socialists to Wage Great Battle for Socialism in City Campaign,” the story said, …“The Socialists of Everett will have three candidates in the field and we intend to put up the greatest fight that has ever been waged in a city election. The campaign committee intends to have a copy of the Northwest Worker sent to every voter every week for five weeks previous to election day. We are getting our campaign material ready, and if we don’t make the Henry Dubbs sit up and take notice we will lose our guess.” [ix] And so it went. Every issue featured stories such as “Commissioner Salter Answers Critics, [x] “Practical Achievements of A Socialist Commissioner,” [xi] and “Commissioner Salter Has Made Good on Everett’s City Council – Deserves Support of Workers.” [xii] Salter won the three-way primary, [xiii] but lost in the runoff general election on November 16th. Of his loss, he said: I was defeated because I stood for theories of economics and principles of municipal government that the majority of Everett’s citizens were not yet ready to accept. This alone was not sufficient to insure my defeat. It was necessary for my opponent and his supporters to resort to every dirty trick known to corrupt politics. They went from house to house circulating the most vicious and malicious falsehoods about me. They appealed to religious intolerance, ignorance, prejudice, and patriotism and proved that Dr. Johnson, the eminent English scholar, was right when he said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” …[xiv] Any bitter feelings from the election appeared to soon have passed as the pages of the Northwest Worker quickly reverted to the newspaper’s accustomed role of reporting the mundane news of local Socialists (“The Social Science Study Club held its regular meeting Sunday afternoon at the Forum. Quite a lot of valuable discussion took place.” [xv]), and its fears of America’s likely entry into the First World War, a debate that took place around big businesses’ national push for “preparedness,” a term the Socialists saw as a euphemism for the profits to be made in war. [xvi] There were also occasional articles on the powerful firm of Stone & Webster that sought to control local electrical and water utilities and electrical transportation systems, including city trolleys and the popular interurban electric trains. [xvii] Everett had already started to acquire its own water supply and build a transmission system to bypass the Stone & Webster monopoly.
On May 1st, the shingle weavers, the men who worked in Everett’s many mills producing cedar shingles, went on strike. The shingle-making business had recently recovered from a severe recession and shingle weavers throughout the state had for the most part returned to their pre-recession wages, but the mill owners in Everett refused to go along, and the workers went out. The Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W., or the Wobblies) subsequently injected themselves into this volatile mix. Although the members of the radical I.W.W. had little support among the shingle-weaver craft unionists, their appearance scared and angered the Everett business establishment and pushed them into precipitating confrontations that ultimately resulted in the “Everett Massacre” six months later. [xx] By late summer, mill owners—with the cooperation of Everett Commissioner of Public Safety Thomas J. Kelly and County Sheriff Don McRae – sought to defeat the strike with strike breakers and armed thugs. On August 24, 1916, the Northwest Worker reported:
KELLY AND McRAE
DEFEND STRIKE- City and County Police Force Used to Help Beat Up Striking Shingleweavers and Give Gunmen Plenty of Freedom Once again King-Kelly has demonstrated the fact to the citizens of Everett that he is the High Mogul in this neck of the woods. The “King” is spending more than a thousand dollars a month of Everett taxpayers’ money in order to keep “specials” to protect the interests of the mill owners. This fact was demonstrated when some 75 strike breakers attacked the picket line of 19 union shingle weavers at the Cargo mill last Saturday morning and the police stood by and laughed and seemed tickled to death to see the pickets get a licking. We were always under the impression that the police force were to be used for the keeping of law and order but we are fully convinced now, that the police force, in Everett anyhow, is for the human protection of capitalist property, human or concrete. The human property (scabs) on that memorable morning needed no protection as they were 4 to 1, but in the evening when some 150 unionists and sympathizers were on hand to give the scabs a drubbing the police butted in with their guns and protected the scabs and gunmen. If there was ever a tool of the capitalists, Kelly is that one. His utter contempt for a man in overalls, the men that elected him, has been shown on dozens of occasions and the older he gets the worse he seems to get. In the council chamber the other day he stated that he was not going to “let roughnecks run the city” and yet at the same time he is giving the freedom of the city to imported gunmen, who are being paid $40 a week to be ready to start trouble. …[xxi] (Appendix B) While the mill owners went after the strikers, the city police were busy breaking up the Wobblies’ attempts to recruit followers to their cause. Northwest Worker editor Henry Watts wrote of his own arrest when he protested the police’s handling of the Wobblies: Since writing the front page article dealing with the trouble in Everett ["KELLY AND McRAE DEFEND STRIKE …" above], Ye Editor with 22 men and two women, have had a night’s sojourn in the Everett city jail. It so happened that two weeks ago an I.W.W. was arrested for speaking . . . [in] . . . the city. Two days afterward another I.W.W. came into town and opened a book store and the police notified him that they were going to get him. After the fracas on Saturday the police rounded up all the outsiders, that had come into town to help the shingleweavers on picket duty, and took them out of town to Seattle, among them being the bookseller with his stock of books. That was the match that started the trouble on Tuesday evening, when some 24 I.W.W.’s came into town, along with Organizer Thompson, to hold a street meeting. No sooner had the meeting started than the police pounced upon the bunch and marched them down to the city jail. Ye Editor went nosing around the city hall for copy and accidentally told an officer of law and order (?) what he thought of the high-handed methods of the authorities, and before you could count ten, he found himself in front of iron bars with all kinds of company, human and animal. After a night of celebration the I.W.W.’s were shipped back to Seattle and Ye Editor’s case laid over till Thursday. After the arrest of the first batch of prisoners, one by one, others got upon the soap-box and were arrested, but finally the police gave in and allowed the speaking to go on without arrests. Another invasion of the I. W. W.’s is assured for Wednesday night but as the paper goes to press too early to record the result our readers must be patient until the next issue. It appears at this time, however, that the authorities have had all they want and will be glad when the fracas can be settled. As for ourself, we are just tickled to death because more sentiment has been turned against the action of the city and county authorities in the past few days than has been stirred up for a number of years. [xxii] The police harassment of the Wobblies continued, but the Wobblies kept coming back to Everett to give their recruiting speeches and promptly get arrested and jailed or smartly and often painfully chased out of town. Filling a community’s jails with “Free Speech” protestors was a classic and effective Wobbly tactic. Typically, the overwhelmed city would give in and let the Wobblies go about their business. Everett’s reaction, however, was to fight back. Sheriff McRae, with the support of the city’s Commercial Club, recruited several hundred citizens to volunteer as deputy sheriffs. Calling them the “Noble 300,” the Northwest Worker contemptuously described this posse as, “most … are business men and office seekers, and they sure presented some sight. Some of them were old and crippled and had one foot in the grave. These joined thinking that maybe they could die a hero’s (?) death. Some of them had a lower chest on them which proved conclusively that they had not been acquainted with work for many a year. … We are pleased to report that the deputies are still alive and doing well and the workers are saving money by getting a good laugh at the expense of these heroes.” [xxiii] By the second week of September, according the Northwest Worker, the newly christened deputies had proved to be less laughable. “Mob Of Everett Merchants And Mill Owners Run Amuck In City,” cried the paper’s headline. GANG OF HOODLUM COCKROACH MERCHANTS ARMED WITH LOADED CLUBS AND GUNS, ATTACK AMERICAN CITIZENS Some of the most disgraceful scenes have been enacted in the city of Everett during the past week, that have ever disturbed the tranquility of the City of Smokestacks. The city has been absolutely at the mercy of a mob of merchants and manufacturers armed to the teeth stirring up trouble on every hand. Hoodlums Run City Over three hundred of these hoodlums parade the street nightly, causing citizens to seek places of safety. On Thursday and Friday of last week this mob attacked a crowd of citizens who were listening to a public speaker, pulled the speaker off the box, grabbed several others in the crowd and dragged them to the county bastile. When this mob arrived at the bastile the doors were unlocked and they were permitted to enter with their so-called prisoners. … . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . … The three men that were arrested Monday evening and two others that were taken off the train were hauled out to the outskirts of the city, stripped and beaten by McRae and his gang. [xxiv] (Appendix C) In the subsequent two available issues (September 28th and October 26th), all that are included in the collection before the November 5th “massacre,” there are no further articles on the city’s labor troubles, except for a short item on the 28th written by the shingle weaver union’s local president attesting to his union’s determination to continue the strike even after five months on picket lines. The next available issue of the paper is for November 23rd. Two weeks had passed since the ambush by the Commercial Club deputies of the Wobblies as they tried to land in Everett from the steamer Verona. The front page of the paper is covered with photographs of the Wobbly dead. These photographs, taken in a morgue, received wide circulation in the radical media of the day. The Wobblies even made postcards of the pictures and circulated them as propaganda. [xxv] The edition of November 28, 1916 also included a list of over 70 men who participated in the sheriff’s posse, divided between business people (the majority) and “Wage Slave Deputies.” This list would continue to run in many subsequent editions. When the Verona and a second steamer, together carrying about 300 Wobblies, returned to Seattle on November 5th, 74 Wobblies were arrested. All but one were eventually released. Teamster Tom Tracy was charged with murder and through the spring of 1917 the Northwest Worker followed the dramatic trial that ended in his acquittal. [xxvi] The United States entered the First World War on April 6, 1917 and there was a new edge to the national and international news of the war published in the paper—an edge too, to the local coverage. On April 19th, the editor was arrested and jailed for libel: The arrest resulted from the publication on April 5 in the Northwest Worker of the following alleged libelous statement: “We have a Prince in Everett who runs around to the Commercial Club every day for his orders. He is at present running a scab lunch counter which is also a recruiting headquarters for gunmen and legalized murderers.” The [charging] information explains that the passage: “gunmen and legalized murderers” meant American soldiers recruiting at artillery headquarters in the store of Henry M. Prince, 1611 Hewitt Avenue. This inference, said the complaint, meant that “Twelfth company artillerymen were gunmen and murderers, tending to expose them to ridicule and hatred, published maliciously and unlawfully.” [xxvii] (Appendix D) The libel charges against Watts were eventually dismissed, [xxviii] but his brief sojourn in the jail allowed him to visit and report on the Wobblies still incarcerated there: With the help of the Everett Commercial Club we managed to get a night’s lodging in the county jail this week and were able to get an inside view and opinion from the “wobblies” who are incarcerated in the bastile through the machinations of my friends of the Commercial Club. The boys are in better spirits than one would expect after five months in jail. They keep things lively around there. A phonograph is brought into use every now and again in one of the “tanks” but after a while that kind of music gets tiresome, so somebody starts up on a fiddle, and although there are no celebrated musicians to handle the instrument, still a little music is obtained. I.W.W. songs are being sung all day long. After every meal the boys march around the tanks in lockstep fashion to the tune of “Hold the Fort” and many other songs. [xxix] (Appendix D) In May, the paper reported on the arrest of two Seattle Socialists for distributing anti-draft leaflets, while a debate ranged among Socialists over allowing themselves to be drafted or refusing and risking jail. [xxx] Late in September, Watts ran a small article that foretold his future arrest again—an arrest that would end to his deportation in 1918: How They Love Us We are informed by “Red” Doran I.W.W. organizer, that he has seen a warrant that has been issued for the arrest of ye editor ... It seems too bad that the authorities will persist in disturbing us from our peaceful pursuits. We have been in jail four times already and if they keep it up it will soon be like home to us. Guess we must be too autocratic and they want to get us out of the way in order that America might be made safe for Democracy. We know, dear reader, that you are sick and tired of hearing that item, but it is the only string the jingoes have on their fiddle and we want to help them fiddle it so that it might wear out. [xxxi]
APPENDIX A
The Northwest Worker
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