November 2006 Labor History

The Everett Massacre of 1916:

Labor led the fight against a police state in 1916 – and must do so again today

First one shot was fired, then two more. Then dozens of the deputies began firing. The steamer lurched, and almost capsized. Several men lost their balance on the decks made slippery by blood, and fell into the bay. The deputies turned their guns on the men in the water. Only one man who fell overboard ever returned to the deck of the steamer.

When the deputies finally stopped firing, and the dead and the wounded and the missing could be tallied, it became clear that four of the union men on the steamer had been killed instantly. One died later at a hospital. Six were reported missing. All six were probably shot dead while in the water or drowned after having been wounded. Twenty-seven other union members were wounded. The youngest was an 18-year-old laborer; the oldest a 68-year-old longshoremen.

It was Sunday, November 5, 1916 – “Bloody Sunday.”

This November marks the 90^th anniversary of the Everett Massacre, the day sheriff’s deputies killed members of the Industrial Workers of the World on board a steamer attempting to dock in the port city of Everett, Washington. The union members had traveled from Seattle, hoping to attend a rally to support freedom of speech and a strike of timber workers. The fierce struggle in Everett in 1916 deserves to be remembered; it shows how bitter the fight to defend civil liberties and labor rights has been in this country.

The Wobblies on board the steamer Verona were attempting to dock in Everett to support a strike which had gone on since May. Everett was a city of 35,000 people in 1916. The port city on Puget Sound exported a considerable amount of lumber every year. The countryside surrounding Everett was sprinkled with timber camps, where lumberjacks – many of them immigrants from northern and Eastern Europe – worked under horrible conditions. In and around the city were the saw mills.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, saw mill workers were among the most exploited workers in Everett. Work in the saw mills of the Pacific Northwest was extremely dangerous.  For 10 hours a day, a man stood beside a whirling razorblade saw; instantaneous death was always a possibility because the timber companies put no safety devices on their machines. There were no nurses or doctors in the saw mills.

Saw mill workers went on strike many times between 1903 and 1913, demanding wage increases and an end to the 10-hour day. They lost all the strikes.

 In 1915, the lumber owners of Everett cut wages by 20 percent, and posted open shop notices. The shingle workers struck. They fought valiantly, but lost. The owners lowered wages throughout the entire state. The strikers did wring a promise from the owners that the old wage scale would be restored when business improved.

In the spring of 1916, the price of shingles jumped because of wartime conditions; the shingle weavers insisted that the owners keep their promise. By that time, the saw mill workers had formed a new union, the International Shingle Weavers Union of America. Like its predecessor, it was an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. Most shingle mill owners in Washington state granted the union’s demand for a wage increase, but the Everett mill owners -- the most influential in the industry – refused.

On May 1, 1916, over 400 shingle workers in Everett went on strike. At first, the strike seemed to be succeeding. In its third week, the lumber mills in the area were forced to cut back to a five-day week. The longshoremen and tugboat workers of the area – who had also gone on strike, on June 1 – helped the shingle workers on the picket line.

This situation soon changed. About three months into the strike, company gun thugs fired into the homes of union pickets. The city authorities increased the arrests of pickets. By the end of July, there were only 60 workers on the picket line; the rest were in jail.

In late July, James Rowan, a leader of the IWW, visited Everett as part of an organizing tour. On the night of July 31, Rowan held a small street meeting at Hewitt and Wetmore Avenues in Everett. He was pulled down from his soapbox by Sheriff Donald McRae, arrested, and questioned for an hour at the county jail. As soon as Rowan was released, he returned to the corner and resumed his speech. He was arrested again and taken to the city jail.

This incident marked the beginning of a long, bitter struggle for civil liberties in Everett. Over the next three months, the Constitution of the United States ceased to exist in the city. The IWW’s one office was ransacked. The owners of meeting halls refused to rent the IWW space to hold public meetings. When the strikers attempted to organize public meetings on street corners, the speakers were arrested.

 Again and again, public speakers were pulled down from platforms by the sheriff and his deputies and jailed. Many times these speakers (and would-be speakers who had just entered town) were viciously beaten and forced to flee the city.

At one rally, every person who stood up to speak was arrested, one right after another. Among those arrested was Letelsia Frey, an Everett woman who was not in the IWW who simply recited the Declaration of Independence. At another rally, the sheriff handed the arrested speakers over for a beating to vigilantes waiting on the steps of the county jail. At that rally, sheriff’s deputies lashed out at the audience, beating even curious bystanders with fists and clubs.

 Vigilantes and railroad detectives began to guard the entrances to the city, stopping and beating even ordinary transient workers not involved with the strike as those workers tried to enter Everett.

As the strike continued, it became increasingly clear that the most powerful force in the city was the Everett Commercial Club, an organization composed of mill owners and business and professional men. The Commercial Club in turn had maneuvered to put  effective control of the county and city government in the hands of  Sheriff McRae, bypassing Everett’s mayor and police chief.

The Commercial Club and the sheriff organized an army of several hundred deputies, divided into various groups, with assignments such as guarding the entrances to the city and patrolling the railroad yards, streets, and hobo jungles. These deputies were recruited from Commercial Club members and the underworld. They were often drunk, and they were given a clear mission: Drive the IWW out of Everett.

The increasing violence of the strike’s opponents shocked the ordinary citizens of Everett. They began to fear for their own safety in a city dominated by drunken, undisciplined deputies and vigilantes. On September 15, 2006, a protest meeting was held in a city park. Injured union members and local citizens who had been assaulted expressed their outrage. Ten thousand people – almost a third of the city’s population – attended this gathering.

The next day, the authorities showed their contempt for public opinion by enacting an ordinance forbidding public speaking at the corner of Hewitt and Wetmore without permission. In response, a committee of clergymen, labor leaders, and local citizens met to discuss how to get the city “out of Russia and back into the United States.” They agreed to call for a public meeting at the corner of Hewitt and Wetmore at 2 p.m. on November 5, 1916, in order to test the constitutionality of the ban on meeting there.

It was that meeting that the 200 members and supporters of the IWW on board the steamer Verona were headed to when sheriff’s deputies shot at them on November 5. The union members had assembled at the IWW office in Seattle and marched together to the steamer, singing. Unfortunately, someone – probably one of the two Pinkerton agents who had infiltrated their group – telephoned their plans to the authorities, who were waiting.

In the days before the November 5 rally, new deputies were being sworn in daily in Everett. By Sunday, November 5, some 500 men were on the sheriff’s force. These men were issued weapons and bombarded with speeches about the “IWW menace.” At one o’clock on Sunday afternoon, they were summoned to the Commercial Club by blasts of the mill whistles. There, they were given liquor and sent to the city dock to wait for their victims.

The deputies took up positions inside the warehouse at the end of the dock, on the dock itself, and on the adjacent docks and elsewhere, so that the Verona could be covered from all angles. (This was done in such a disorganized manner that those on the open dock were within the line of fire of those concealed in the warehouse.) Then, after the steamer’s bowline was tied and the boat secured to the dock, Sheriff McRae ordered the Verona’s passengers not to land. At the same time, he held up his hand. This was the prearranged signal for the first shot, which was probably the prearranged signal to open fire. The deputies poured bullets into the steamer, and when men fell into the water, targeted them. But once Sheriff McRae was wounded in the leg, the disorganization and lack of discipline of the deputies was plain to see. The deputies ran around wildly, firing in all directions, even at each other. As a result, two deputies were killed, and 20 wounded.

When the Verona limped back to Seattle, 200 patrolmen and 30 detectives with their revolvers drawn marched to the dock to meet the steamer, whose windows, rails, and sides were riddled with bullets. The police arrested the Wobblies on board, and searched them all. Not a single weapon was found. Despite that fact, the death of the two deputies became the pretext for vengeance. Eventually, 74 union men were charged with first-degree murder in the death of Deputy Jefferson Beard. The authorities dropped any reference to the other deputy killed at the dock because he had been killed by a rifle bullet. Only the deputies had rifles that day.

A vigorous defense campaign was organized for the union men. Public meetings were held, money raised, and telegrams sent to the governor insisting on a fair trial. These appeals came from across the country, from other countries, and from both AFL and IWW locals. The unions of Guadalajara, Mexico wired Governor Lister demanding “that justice be done in the case of our murdered brothers and that exemplary punishment be meted out to those officials who have shown themselves to be the servile instruments of the lumber industry.” (Industrial Worker, January 6, 1917).

On March 5, 1917, the first of the prisoners – Thomas H. Tracy – was tried in Seattle. It was the one of the longest and most important trials in the history of the U.S. labor movement. The Tracy trial became a trial of the IWW itself as well as a murder trial. The prosecution did everything it could to portray the militant union as a terrorist group, but the defense was able to refute those claims, and also show that the prosecution’s theory of how the deaths occurred was completely unbelievable.

On May 4, 1917, the jury retired to consider the case. After 22 ballots, it returned with a verdict of “not guilty.” The murder charges against the other Verona passengers were dropped. This was the first victory for labor on the Pacific Coast. Shortly after Tracy’s acquittal, the mill owners yielded to the Shingle Weavers’ demands, raised wages and ceased their open-shop demands. After a long, bitter year of struggle, the strike had finally been won. The 74 Wobblies released from jail reported to the Seattle IWW hall for assignments as “job delegates” and left for the logging and construction camps.

It is especially important to commemorate those who died in the Everett Massacre this November. The men who died on November 5, 1916 came from different backgrounds and different parts of this country. Among them were Abraham Rabinowitz of New York City; Hugo Gerlot of Milwaukee; Gustav Johnson of Seattle; John Looney of Ayer, Massachusetts; and Felix Baran of Brooklyn. They were French, German, Swedish, Irish, and Jewish. Those men and the other workers who died on November 5 or who were brutally beaten in the months-long struggle in Everett sacrificed much in the fight to protect civil liberties in the United States. The extent of their devotion to the cause of social justice is worth recalling now, at a time when civil liberties are under such a relentless assault in this country. The voices of international solidarity raised in defense of the 74 unionists falsely accused of murder in 1916 are also important to remember.

Today, the attack on civil liberties is not being directed simply by a lone drunken sheriff acting as the flunky of one shabby group of wealthy businessmen in the far corner of the country. Today, the attack on civil liberties is something far more systematic and dangerous, part of a plan by those in power to keep that power. To defeat that plan, we will need every ounce of the courage shown by those who fought so bravely for free speech in Everett in 1916.

Labor led the fight to stop America from becoming a police state in 1916 and it needs to lead that fight again 90 years later.