You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday February 15, 1917
From Everett Labor Journal: Report on Industrial Warfare, Part I
Over a period of three weeks, from January 26th to February 9th, The Labor Journal of Everett, Washington, published the “Report on Everett’s Industrial Warfare,” by E. P. Marsh, President of the Washington State Federation of Labor, which report he had delivered on the first day of that bodies annual convention, Monday January 22, 1917. Hellraisers Journal will republish the entire report, in three parts, beginning today with Part I:
EVERETT’S INDUSTRIAL WARFARE, PART I
EVERETT’S INDUSTRIAL WARFARE
—–SUPPLEMENTAL REPORT BY PRESIDENT MARSH
—–
For several reasons I have thought best to cover the stirring industrial events transpiring in the city of Everett during the past year in a separate report from that printed and mailed to the delegates prior to the opening of this convention. The main part of my annual report was prepared early in December. This report was prepared one month later that it might bring the situation as near as possible up to date. The seriousness of the situation, the tragedies and clashes that marked the struggle, has attracted the attention of the entire United States and the situation deserves to be dealt with quite apart from any other subject.
To relate in circumstantial detail each step of the conflict that has soiled the pages of Everett’s industrial history, would require more printer’s ink than I am at liberty to use in the Federation proceedings. It shall be my task to attempt to give you a word picture of the restless, resistless forces at work in this community which have produced near anarchy, lessened respect for constituted authority, wounded nigh unto death the community spirit which ought to prevail in every hamlet, city and town, and brought bloodshed and death in their wake. It will not be a pretty picture to look upon, but it is drawn with the hope that it will be truthful rather than fanciful, may point the way toward a different viewpoint upon the part of those who have hitherto held aloof from the industrial struggle, holding the eternal conflict between capital and labor to be no particular concern of theirs.
The labor interests, the manufacturing and commercial interests; the business and professional interests, all played a part, some unwittingly, in the weaving of their drama which ended in tragedy, and all have suffered alike from the misunderstandings, the cupidity, the bigotry, the hatred, which, mixed in the alchemy of class conflict, brought forth class hatred and its handmaiden, the law of physical force, as an arbiter of human problems. If this report shall be some times narrative, sometimes argumentative, it is with a very definite end in view. Dame Rumor shall play small part in this report, but I shall try to set forth clearly established facts. You may not agree in the end with the deductions I shall draw from the struggle, but I intend that at least none shall successfully dispute the statement of facts set forth.
Running through all the story is the stormy history of an organization which was born in , industrial strife, an organization that has held the center of Everett’s industrial stage for many weary months, which has fought, sometimes illadvisedly, but always valorously. The writer knows its history well, having been connected with it since the first page was written until now. The nature of a man’s occupation, his daily working environment, marks in large degree the nature of the man himself, and cannot help but mold the early years at least of his economic organization.
Men who flirt with death in their daily calling become inured to physical danger, they become contemptuous of the man whose calling fails to bring forth physical prowess. So do they in their organizations become irritated and contemptuous at the long-drawn-out process of bargaining, the duel of wits and brain power engaged in by more conservative organizations to win working concessions. Their motto becomes “strike quick and strike hard,” ofttimes never pausing to think of the retroactive character of strikes. It is only after bitter defeats have been administered, generally after a long period of years marked by stormy conflict, do such organizations come to the realization that victories are many times more easily won and more lasting in their effect through the use of brain than of brawn.
The Everett Shingle Weavers Union was born in 1901 of a strike which it won. It grew amazingly in numbers and soon embraced practically every skilled man engaged in the industry. In 1905 it successfully resisted a wage reduction. In 1906 it went out in a sympathetic strike with the Ballard Weavers, who were fighting for the union scale of wages and union recognition. This strike it lost decisively. The defeat was an utter rout, but a mere handful remaining in the union ranks when the strike was settled. Yet so strong were the recuperative powers of the weavers at that time, so imbued with the spirit of co-operative effort that in less than a year they were again 100 per cent organized and successfully negotiated an increased scale of wages without the necessity of striking a single mill.
Adopt Trade Agreement
There had been in the International organization a few men who had watched closely the working of the trade agreement in other organizations, notably the United Mine Workers, an organization composed of men engaged in equally hazardous calling. They had seen that this secret success of that organization lay in the fact that it was not continuously on strike or resisting a lockout and therefore had time to do constructive work, organize thoroughly the men and pile up defense funds against possible trouble. International President Brown after several heart-to-heart talks with the Everett local, persuaded the union to try the trade agreement plan of doing business. Trade agreements running for a period of eighteen months were negotiated with twelve plants in the Everett jurisdiction. Despite any denial they were successful during their period of operation. There were eighteen months of industrial peace, marked only by petty disagreements. No trade agreement that ever was drawn gave absolute satisfaction, because agreements will sometimes be fractured or something done not in accord with its spirit. But the whole tendency of the trade agreement is to recognize that each side has definite rights and that business methods ought to prevail in adjusting differences so that those rights may be assured without the monetary loss, physical and mental suffering attendant on strikes and lockouts.
During the life of these agreements, however, a spirit of discord crept into the union, attacking the principle of collective bargaining through the written trade agreement. Every petty infraction, by a foreman or superintendent, of the agreement, was magnified out of all proportion and laid at the door of the trade agreement principle. The conservative men in the organization were ridiculed, their methods censured, they were accused of being little better than dupes of the employing class. Direct action, syndicalism, sabotage, all were held up as the up-to-date, effective methods of winning labor struggles. The constant agitation slowly but surely did its work and at the expiration of these trade agreements it would not have been possible to have renewed them had the employers been willing, so strong was the opposition within the union ranks.
1915 STRIKE
In the spring of 1915, the climax of an industrial depression in the shingle industry extending over a period of years, a notice of wage reduction was posted in the Everett mills. Whether or not, in view of the depressed condition of the shingle market the weavers would have been justified in accepting temporarily a wage reduction, is a question that is at least open to argument. Weavers generally believed a wage reduction would not help the situation for the operators. The majority of the shingle manufacturers have little to do with setting the price and in the other the broker. A decreased cost of labor manufacture would be met by an increased log price and a depressed shingle price and the situation would be no better than before, the logger reasoning that by lessened cost of production the operator could stand a little advance in the price of raw material while the broker took it out of him on the other end. The men knew from experience the hard struggle attendant upon most efforts to restore former wage scales or increase present ones. Suffice it to say that the reduction was rejected without the formality of an argument about it on the part of the weavers.
After a short but bitter struggle the strike was declared off and the men permitted to go back upon the best terms they could get. The duration of this strike was marked by ill feeling, occasional violence, the familiar court injunction process, the importation of professional strike breakers and strike guards, always the scum of the earth and a menace to the social welfare of any community they infest.
The operators realized their fond but foolish dream of crushing the Shingle Weavers union and throughout the state of Washington it lay crushed and broken.
Re-Organization of 1916
Men there were, however, possessed of the faith that works miracles, holding together by sheer will power and dominant personality, a skeleton of an organization. It takes something more than a tidal wave to crush utterly the spirit of such men. Quietly the work of reorganization was undertaken. A convention was called to meet in Seattle in April of last year, which was attended by a handful of determined men. These men saw clearly the mistakes of the past and worked a change in the organic law of the organization which amounted almost to a revolution. The principle of the trade agreement was adopted as one of the cardinal principles of the organization, with scarcely a dissenting voice and with no dissenting vote. The power hitherto vested in a local union to declare a strike on or off at will was abrogated and the International Executive Board made the final strike arbiter. The organization was building firmly at last. This convention determined to make a stand for a restoration of the 1915 scale throughout the jurisdiction, nothing less and nothing more. May 1st was set as the date when this should be effective.
The 1916 Strike
On May 1, or shortly after, a majority of the mills in the state, including some of the largest producing plants existent, paid the scale and good feeling prevailed. Not so in Everett. In this city, the operators made their great mistake, a mistake for which they were to pay proportionately as dearly as had the weavers in the past through theirs. They could not or would not read the signs of the times. They thought they had killed the spirit of unionism, an illusion which many shortsighted employers in other lines have hugged to their breasts, in days gone by and for which they have dearly paid. They should have recognized that it is as natural and as inevitable that working men should organize for mutual protection in this age of highly organized society as it is to eat, to breathe, to sleep.
They should have seen in the newly adopted organic law of the international organization, an appeal to the reasoning, sane business instincts of men, should have understood that a new era in contractual relationship between employer and employe was hovering on the threshold of the shingle industry. They could not see; they would not believe. Imbued with the senseless theory that “industrial peace” could be maintained by allowing them to “run their own business without interference from the union” they spurned the olive branch of conciliation held out to them by union officials, and the strike was on. What can be more nonsensical than the plaint “we own the business and we are going to run it our own way.” Society today allows no man or set of men to “run a business their own way” if that way runs contrary to the best interests of society as a whole.
But one demand was ever or has ever been made since the induction of this strike, and that was the restoration of the 1915 scale. By inference at least the promise had been made at the termination of the 1915 strike that when the shingle prices became normal the wage would be restored. They were restored in other parts of the state, but were steadily refused in Everett, though Everett was on the same cost production basis as were other tidewater mills. No union recognition was ever asked for in this strike, it was a question of wages and wages only.
For a time no attempt was made to operate any of the struck plants. Within a comparatively short time the Seaside Shingle Company, owning one of the largest plants in the city, broke away from the combination, put the old union crew back at work at the union scale and is running at this day, with a splendid force of workmen, a spirit of harmony and loyalty prevailing.
About June 1, several of the other plants began the importation of workmen in an effort to break the strike. Notorious scab herders, men who had made a record for develtry in other localities in other strikes, were employed as strike guards. The formula for strike breaking never changes. The union threw out its line of pickets and the long siege began. The guards and strike breakers taunted the pickets and it were nothing strange if some of the pickets replied in kind. Both sides forgot the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule in the heat and passion of industrial conflict.
One day the strike breakers personally directed and urged on by Neil Jamison, proprietor of one of the struck plants, brutally attacked the picket line and beat several men into insensibility, while the “majestic guardians of the peace,” sworn upholders of the “peace and dignity” of the community, looked on and applauded from their vantage point of ringside seats, thoughtfully removed from too close proximity to the scene of battle. The law of physical force was at work and was to bring forth its finest flower, precisely as it is doing in blood stained Europe. “You hit me first,” said England, “now you’ll get what is coming to you.” Reenforcements were sent for by the enraged pickets and that evening clubs, heads and fists mixed fast and furiously until the police, now moved to stern action by the reverse in the tide of battle, put an end to the encounter with drawn revolvers. The dove of peace gave one look and flew away to a more congenial clime, there was more trouble to come.
A short time later the gage of battle was again thrown down to the strikers. Mr. Jamison, wishing to give his strikebreaking employes a little recreation as a slight token of appreciation of their fighting prowess and all around “efficiency” evolved in his mind a theatre party and conceived the further idea of a street parade in connection therewith The men were brought in column formation up the main avenue. It was their privilege and right to attend any function they wanted to, but the sight of this army of strikebreakers aroused the anger of strike partisans and sympathizers. The intent of that parade was too obvious. As they came out of the theatre the battle cry was sounded and the main engagement of the “summer drive” was on.
I do not pretend to condone or excuse a single action of any strike sympathizer. I do not know to this day who started the attack. Whether it was spontaneous or premeditated is immaterial to the point I want to make in connection, viz that the law of physical force, of reprisal and retaliation, was bearing its sure and certain fruit. How the wheels justice may miscarry is proven by a single incident in connection and it is one of the indictments against our American administration of law. The business agent of the union, Robert H. Mills, was arrested, later tried «d acquitted, of inciting to riot on this occasion. He was thrown in jail in default of bail. The man who swore the complaint against him was the strikebreaker who nearly killed him in the dock battle described above, kicking him in the ribs and head as he lay senseless in the roadway. Yet this man was never arrested for his brutal, murderous assault but was apparently decorated for bravery in action by his employers.
———-
[Photograph and paragraph breaks added.]
SOURCE
The Labor Journal
(Everett, Washington)
-Jan 26, 1917
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88085620/1917-01-26/ed-1/seq-4/
IMAGE
E. P. Marsh, Everett Labor Journal, July 23, 1915
https://www.newspapers.com/image/64503768/
See also:
For more on the Washington State Federation of Labor:
Testimony of E. P. Marsh before the Commission on Industrial Relations
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=z-ceAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA4390
From:
Industrial Relations: Final Report and Testimony, Volume 5
United States, Commission on Industrial Relations
D.C. Gov. Print. Office, 1916
https://books.google.com/books?id=z-ceAQAAMAAJ
Marsh testified on this day:
“Seattle, Wash., Saturday, August 15, 1914—9.30 a. m.
Present: Frank P. Walsh (chairman), Commissioners Garretson, O’Connell, Commons, and Lennon. W. O. Thompson, counsel.”
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=z-ceAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA4369
Workers of the World Awaken – Ariana Eakle
Lyrics by Joe Hill