Q: “Who is your leader?”
A: “We are all leaders!”
-Industrial Workers of the World
Hellraisers Journal, Monday December 4, 1916
From Seattle, Washington – FW Smith on Everett’s Bloody Sunday
In this month’s edition of the International Socialist Review we find Fellow Worker Walker C. Smith’s description of the tragic voyage of the Verona:
The Voyage of the Verona
By WALKER C. SMITH
FIVE workers and two vigilantes dead, thirty-one workers and nineteen vigilantes wounded, from four to seven workers missing and probably drowned, two hundred ninety-four men and three women of the working class in jail—this is the tribute to the class struggle in Everett, Wash., on Sunday, November 5. Other contributions made almost daily during the past six months have indicated the character of the Everett authorities, but the protagonists of the open shop and the antagonists of free speech did not stand forth in all their hideous nakedness until the tragic trip of the steamer Verona. Not until then was Darkest Russia robbed of its claim to “Bloody Sunday.”
Early Sunday morning on November 5 the steamer Verona started for Everett from Seattle with 260 members of the Industrial Workers of the World as a part of its passenger list. On the steamer Calista, which followed, were 38 more I. W.W. men, for whom no room could be found on the crowded Verona. Songs of the One Big Union rang out over the waters of Puget Sound, giving evidence that no thought of violence was present.
It was in answer to a call for volunteers to enter Everett to establish free speech and the right to organize that the band of crusaders were making the trip. They thought their large numbers would prevent any attempt to stop the street meeting that had been advertised for that afternoon at Hewitt and Wetmore avenues in handbills previously distributed in Everett. Their mission was an open and peaceable one.
