The deportation crusade began in Seattle late in 1917. The country was at war, an unpopular war, and there was an unsettled timber strike in the woods of western Washington. The city was awash with migrant workers – most of them loggers, sheltering from the winter rains. The war time strike wave continued unabated; from Russia the news was foreboding. There were whispers of revolution everywhere.
Desperate, the city’s embattled employers joined the lumbermen in begging for federal intervention. This had been withheld in the first years of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, but in 1917 they would get it – a scheme to deport en masse “alien radicals.” The suppression of working-class radicalism didn’t begin in Seattle, but the deportations did, taking repression to a new level. Arbitrar…
The deportation crusade began in Seattle late in 1917. The country was at war, an unpopular war, and there was an unsettled timber strike in the woods of western Washington. The city was awash with migrant workers – most of them loggers, sheltering from the winter rains. The war time strike wave continued unabated; from Russia the news was foreboding. There were whispers of revolution everywhere.
Desperate, the city’s embattled employers joined the lumbermen in begging for federal intervention. This had been withheld in the first years of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, but in 1917 they would get it – a scheme to deport en masse “alien radicals.” The suppression of working-class radicalism didn’t begin in Seattle, but the deportations did, taking repression to a new level. Arbitrary and ruthless in its application, Seattle’s campaign would become a model for the better-known crusades to come – the “Red Scare” and US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s national raids of 1919-1920.
Seattle was a boom town in the 1910s; its shipyards, waterfront and monopoly of the Alaska trade outpaced all else on the Pacific Coast. Seattle was also the center of radicalism in the Pacific Northwest. In a surging economy, its powerful labor movement was led by socialists. Eugene Debs, best- known socialist of the times, reckoned Washington to be the first state to “go socialist.” It didn’t, but in 1919 Seattle was the site of the great General Strike, five days in February when workers and their unions ran the city and “nothing moved but the tide.” The authorities were reduced to observers.
Seattle was also the western home to the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). The IWW was, if not the largest, the best known of the radical organizations of the day. In the years since its founding in Chicago in 1905, the IWW had migrated westward; its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, was published in Seattle. Its base increasingly was in the hard-rock miners, the wheatfield hands, and, in the Northwest, the loggers in the vast coastal forests. The Wobbly’s syndicalist views were in themselves enough to frighten the cities well-to-do. But more, the Wobblies seemed capable of turning almost any grievance into a strike if not a rebellion. Then came the war – a war the Wobblies opposed, as did the majority of Seattle’s workers. Overnight, they were redefined as traitors; “aliens” and Wobblies – the terms became synonymous. They were to be got rid of, now targeted by a vengeful administration in the other Washington.
In winter the loggers, men and boys, in their hundreds if not thousands, left their camps for to the bleak mill towns of the Puget Sound country, but above all they came to Seattle. There they frequented the bars, brothels and flop houses, where they revisited their great strike, then on hold. In the past summer and fall the loggers had been on strike, led by the IWW, a general strike, one that ultimately would be the Wobbly’s greatest achievement. In Seattle, 1917, these loggers, rubbed shoulders with longshoremen and militant shipyard workers. It was an incendiary mix.
The lumbermen despaired in the face of this, a history of Wobbly’s free speech wars* and guerrilla strikes; also, of the array of demands upon them, for the 8-hour day (which they won), for clean bedding and good food, as well as for the cost of paying the expenses of overflowing jails and legal fees.
At the same time, of course, the employers depended upon these workers, though they despised them. They were “… the scum of the earth… a landless and lawless mob who having no property themselves recognize no rights or property… no law, no authority save the policeman’s night stick or physical violence.” They saw them as like “cattle” to be “driven” from camp to camp or county to county, if they resisted to be “crushed.”
But nothing seemed to dishearten the Wobblies, not mass arrests, not foul jails, not even extreme violence. Everett, the city of smoke stacks thirty miles north of Seattle, “was the scene,” wrote the journalist, John Reed, “of the Everett Massacre, where deputy sheriffs and private detectives fired upon a steamboat full of labor organizers from Seattle and killed five and wounded thirty.”
*See the epic 1910 free speech battle in Spokane
Yet, despite this, the employers, and the local authorities -county sheriffs and city or town politicians, plus hired guards and vigilantes, – seemed incapable of subduing the Wobblies, hence the years of hounding the federal government to intervene on their behalf. But in 1917 they would have their way; “the business men who inspired the Everett Massacre,” wrote Reed, these men “were behind the deportation scheme.”
The war had tipped the scales, dissent became treason, and in Seattle deportation, became an obsession. The “technique… most persuasive,” according to one immigration officer.” On what grounds? the “feds” scoured the books, then as now, what laws applied? The Aliens and Sedition Act of 1798? not much use. The Espionage Act of 1918 better; it would make it illegal to do anything that interfered with the war effort, including criticizing the government, the flag, or the military.
The truth, however, was that the employers and the federal agents who worked with them cared little about the law. And they believed they were thwarted by local law enforcement that tended to be unreliable and juries that wouldn’t convict. So, they joined with men like Rev. Mark Matthews, who came to speak for the city’s “patriots”: “the military authorities had concurrent jurisdiction when the civil authorities broke down… they could arrest these fiends, court martial and shoot them.” Or deport them.
“The West,” according to Reed, had become “the epicenter of the anti-immigrant hysteria and the deportation schemes that followed” Since December, 1917, “foreigners active in the Labor Movement had been quietly arrested.” There were midnight raids, kidnapping in broad daylight with no fear of retribution, no need to explain anyone’s rights. George Vanderveer, the well-known Seattle attorney who frequently represented Wobblies, reported that “the immigration officers frequently stated that their purpose was, if possible, to prevent the men from securing a hearing in court, notwithstanding that they have been restrained of their liberty and denied their legal rights all the way from seven to seventeen months.”
The Bureau responded that the charge of deportation provided an alternative to costly, time-consuming jail time and trials, as well as the arduous process of charging and convicting every individual defendant. And for those who got hearings, these were at best cursory (no lawyers permitted). Few immigration agents spoke anything but English. They threatened defendants with physical force while being questioned, “Just get rid of them” became the mantra of the day.
The Bureau of Investigation, predecessor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (led with enthusiasm by the young J. Edgar Hoover), charged itself with “rooting out and deporting enemy aliens.” Hundreds, deemed by the Bureau to be “undesirable” or “pro- German” in their activities were incarcerated. The roundup filled the Bureau’s own detention centers, forcing it to scatter prisoners throughout the county jails of western Washington. William Preston Jr, the historian of the “Red Scare,” called it a state of “lawlessness.”
Still, this was Seattle and the people did not support the campaign. The “foreigners” tended to be British Isles born or Scandinavian, not so easy to single out. And Germans? not too many. The anti- immigrant hysteria of the times certainly existed, but was limited largely to Asians, terrible as that could be, but here there was nothing quite like the nightmare in the East. In Seattle there were lawyers to be hired, and they were; the unions were industrial, at least in spirit; they paid the bills.
In the end, the damage done, the Seattle deportation campaign was a failure; it resulted in very few actual deportations. There was little support for it and much opposition. The federal officials and their collaborators turned out to be incompetent detectives and lawyers, and untrustworthy judges. Nevertheless, in 1919, when the administration in Washington, DC, chose a course for their own crusade against immigrants, they followed Seattle’s policies and enforcement. “The anti-radical hysteria of one city,” found Preston, thus “projected its purely local campaign onto a national scale, initiating a chain of events culminating in the alien communist roundup in Palmer’s 1919-1920 raids.”
` The final episode in Seattle’s deportation crusade, long delayed, took place on the eve of the General Strike; the immigration agents feared an “insurrection” in the morning. The US Attorney in Seattle telegraphed the Justice Department: “Intention of strike is revolution led by extreme element openly advocating overthrow of government.” He insisted that the radical aliens then held in Seattle must be removed immediately, no later than February 5, 1919, the date set for the General Strike.
Instead, the strike – unique in this country’s history – was an entirely peaceful week during which the workers, members of 110 local unions, ran the city, providing milk for the babies, food for families, garbage collection, and safe streets patrolled by unarmed union members. It was the first time ever that no one went hungry.
Nevertheless, the deportation operation went forward. By the time the strike began, fifty-four prisoners, shackled, were boarded on to the “Red Special.” “Heavily protected with armed guards,” the New York* Call*wrote, “the phantom train, on a ‘mystery schedule’ bearing ‘very dangerous persons’ across the land of the free, whisked over the continent from Seattle.” The supposedly unrepentant and desperate IWWs were on board, toward New York City, there to be shipped off to Europe.
The trip to New York, was not, however, without drama. In Butte, Montana, one of the nation’s great copper towns, “a crowd of thousands of miners stormed the station,” hoping to free the prisoners but found that the train had made a detour and been rerouted north through Helena. In Chicago, dozens of heavily armed plainclothesmen patrolled the platforms of Union Station. For the rest of the trip to New York, the federal government inducted every county sheriff and constable along the way.
In New York City, a series of mass protests, organized by the Socialist Party, received the train. The barge passage to the prison on Ellis Island, where the prisoners were to be kept incommunicado, was contested; fights broke out, and soldiers had to be dispatched. In the end, overwhelmed in legal challenges, the government released twelve of the prisoners. Five more accepted deportation; the Labor Department secured the release of another two. Those remaining sued for writs of habeas corpus. In the end a total of seven were deported.
Cal Winslow’s latest book is Radical Seattle, the General Strike of 1919
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Cal Winslow is a retired Fellow in Environmental History at the University of California, Berkeley and is Director of the Mendocino Institute. He was trained as an historian at Antioch College and Warwick University where he studied under the direction of the late Edward Thompson. He is a co-author of the re-released Albion’s Fatal Tree (Verso 2011). In the 1970s he worked as a warehouseman, truck driver and journalist, a participant in and observer of the rank-and-file workers’ rebellion of the decade. He is an editor of Rebel Rank and File, Labor Militancy and Revolt from below During the Long 1970s (Verso, 2010). He taught labor studies at the Center for Worker Education, City College of New York and was a visiting Senior Lecturer at the Northern College for Residential Adult Working Class Education in South Yorkshire. His is author of many books, including E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left (Monthly Review 2014). His most recent is Radical Seattle, the General Strike of 1919 (Monthly Review, 2019). He lives with his family on the Mendocino Coast of Northern California. He and his wife, Faith Simon, a Family Nurse Practitioner specializing in pediatrics, are founding members of Mendocino Parents for Peace and are associated with the Bay Area gathering Retort.