June 16, 1917: Thank A Wobbly For Your Freedoms

The summer of 1917 was far, far away from the Summer of Love in more ways than the chronologically obvious. The United States having entered World War I on April 6 of that year, pro-war hysteria and anti-union policy--the latter a sad corollary of the former--then ran rampant nationwide, and the brunt of both was taken most acutely by the Industrial Workers of the World.

Since the IWW, a k a the Wobblies, represented the most radical and openly antiwar voices of the labor movement in the US at the time, they posed the biggest threat to the production of US war paraphernalia, and were mistreated accordingly by the authorities--especially in Seattle, host to one of the IWW's leading offices. On the date in focus here, soldiers and sailors blindsidingly attacked the IWW's Seattle office on a day when, likely not coincidentally, the Wobblies were on the verge of leading a strike of Northwest loggers that would soon virtually halt the timber industry in Washington state. Seattle police, not quite out of historical character, rather than protecting the office from the attack, arrested 41 Wobblies, including key local IWW leaders.

The Seattle attack and arrests, part and parcel of many similar events nationwide that summer, failed to dispirit the Wobbly rank-and-file of Cascadia, whose unincarcerated leaders advised them to return to work and continue to strike while on the job. Many Washington Wobblies gladly played that strategy, working with studied sluggishness, quitting often, and in general succeeding in hampering the timber production so crucial to the production of aircraft and other artifacts for the so-called Great War. The federal government would punish the IWW harshly the following September, when Justice Department agents would raid Wobbly offices nationwide with warrants branding the entire IWW leadership as "subversives." A subsequent trial in Chicago would result in prison terms of up to twenty years for nearly the entire first and second tiers of the IWW's national leadership.

The Great War, meanwhile, lived up to its advertisement as "the war to end all wars" for several years afterwards. Next time you see a radical on the street, be sure to thank her for your freedoms. Sources: Seattle Times archives; Seattle Post-Intelligencer archives; HistoryLink.org