Dick Meister: Bolsheviks? In Seattle?

Dick Meister is a distinguished labor reporter who has spent more than 50 years covering labor and issues of workers on their jobs. There are very few real labor reporters in the mainstream press these days, so I asked Meister to put his regular Guardian column in context. B3

Dick Meister explains his labor coverage:

There's a vibrant labor movement in this country, a source of important information that is or should be of great interest to most people. Most people, after all, spend at least half their lives working and, in fact, define themselves by their jobs. Yet the labor movement that has so much to do with their working lives, be they union members or not, is largely ignored by the mainstream media.

I've spent most of my professional life covering the labor movement as a reporter and commentator, for the Chronicle, KQED-TV and other mainstream outlets as well as a wide variety of non-mainstream outlets, including the Bay Guardian. I've recently begun a series of columns for the Guardian that deal with labor issues that have received but slight attention, if any, in the mainstream media.

Among other matters, they covered the extraordinary qualifications of Hilda Solis, President Obama's nominee for secretary of labor, the extraordinary anti-labor acts of Bush's secretary, Elaine Chao, and the legendary career of Franklin Roosevelt's secretary, Frances Perkins.

The columns also concerned labor's forceful anti-war demonstrations last May Day, labor's major role in Obama's election and its eight-year struggle with Bush, the most virulently anti-labor president in history. As another column noted, Bush was particularly harsh on the long-suffering air traffic controllers who Obama promised to help.

Other columns detailed the blatant job discrimination suffered by gay workers in Harvey Milk's time and now, the significant but ignored 40th anniversary of the faculty strike that was waged at San Francisco State at the same time as the widely celebrated student strike, and the 84-hour workweeks and 30-hour workdays that hospitals impose on young doctors-in-training.

My current column deals with a subject most mainstream outlets probably will also ignore, or at best treat very lightly. The column deals with one of the most important events in U.S. labor history, the Seattle general strike that began 90 years ago this month.

BOLSHEVIKS IN SEATTLE?

A bit of labor history the mainstream media will likely ignore: the general strike in Seattle 90 years ago this month

By Dick Meister

It's the 90th anniversary this month of the general strike that brought the city of Seattle to a virtual standstill -- one of the very few general strikes in U.S. history and certainly one of the most dramatic and disruptive.

Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson described it this way: "Street car gongs ceased their clamor. Newsboys cast their unsold papers into the streets. From the doors of mill and factory, store and workshop, streamed 65,000 working men. School children with fear in their hearts hurried homeward. The life stream of a great city stopped."

Many people throughout the country believed that it marked the beginning of a Bolshevik revolution like that which had overthrown the Russian government just two years earlier.

Some of the men who left their jobs did intend it to be just that -- particularly a band of about 3,500 members of the Industrial Workers of the World, whose own radicalism engendered great public fear far out of proportion to their numbers and effectiveness.

But most of the men, as most of their supporters, were intent on nothing more than strengthening the U.S. labor movement, guaranteeing their right to collective bargaining and improving their pay and working conditions in the face of increasingly fierce hostility from employers and government alike.

It was one of no less than 3,600 strikes that broke out nationwide in that
post- World War I year of 1919. Steelworkers, coal miners, workers of all kinds even policemen -- walked off the job in response to drastic reductions in the wages that the heavy demand for labor during the war had brought them, the onerous working conditions that were now imposed on them and the widespread attempts by government and employers to destroy their unions.

The American Federation of Labor's local council called the Seattle strike in support of 35,000 striking shipyard workers. They had been on the picket lines for 2 1/2 weeks, only to be ordered back to work on pain of losing their jobs if they continued to demand the right to bargain through their union for better pay and working conditions.

The AFL council reasoned that if the shipyard owners' arbitrary actions went unchallenged, employers everywhere would be emboldened to act similarly.

Soon after the strike broke out on February 6, Mayor Hanson climbed into his flag-draped automobile and led 950 federal troops into the city. Hanson, insisting that strikers would resort to violence, also swore in 3,000 special policemen and deputies to join the troops.

He needn't have bothered. Strikers did bring Seattle to a halt, closing schools and virtually all businesses and stopping public transportation. But they did so without a single reported incidence of violence -- not even a single arrest for strike-related offenses.

Strikers made certain, furthermore, that essential services continued. Hospital and laundry workers remained on the job, for instance. So did firemen, garbagemen and, of course, policemen. Unionized truck drivers delivered milk from nearby farms to three-dozen distribution stations around the city and brought 30,000 cooked meals a day to 21 other locations.

After six days, it ended. Responding to growing public hostility that threatened to seriously harm the labor movement nationally, the American Federation of Labor's conservative national leaders denounced use of the general strike as a tactic. That left the AFL affiliates in Seattle with little choice but to call off the general strike.

The striking Seattle shipyard workers who the general strike was called to support continued their strike alone for nine more weeks. In the end, they won nothing.

Despite its brevity and lack of success, the general strike played a major role in the social and political turmoil -- the so-called Red Scare -- that erupted after World War I. Union-busting employers, vote-chasing politicians, sensation-seeking newspapers all painted the strike as the first in what surely would be a nationwide series of efforts by native Bolsheviks and Communists to overthrow the U.S. government.

What followed was one of the most disturbing periods in U.S. history. Thousands of aliens were arbitrarily arrested and summarily deported and thousands of citizens were jailed for allegedly subversive activities or even for simply holding allegedly subversive views. Government agents raided the headquarters of unions and radical organizations to search for alleged terrorists. Mobs attacked their members.

Few, if any, revolutionary plots were uncovered. But that wasn't the intent of employers and the government anyway. Their real purpose was to weaken the growing movement to better the economic and political status of working people that was signaled by the general strike in Seattle.

By 1921, it was over. The pro-worker movement had been crushed. It was not until the coming of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration a dozen years later that working people finally won the firm legal right to unionization and other basic economic and political rights that they had so long wanted and had so long needed.

Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has covered labor and political issues for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

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