November 24, 1885: Anna Louise Strong

Anna Louise Strong

An undeniable icon in Seattle’s radical history, as well as that of the nation, Anna Louise Strong was born on the date in focus here in the uncannily-named Friend, Nebraska. She acquired many distinctions during her long life as a social justice activist, among them a Ph.D. in philosophy earned at the age, still precocious today, of twenty-three.

Strong first arrived in Seattle in May 1914, when she brought to the city a national touring exhibit she’d organized to advocate for child welfare. She returned to live here a year later, and in 1916 she ran for, and was easily elected to, the Seattle School Board. When the board’s bureaucracy stifled her wishes to make the city’s public schools into venues for social service programs for underprivileged children, as well as neighborhood community centers, she soon turned to journalism as a source of personal and political fulfillment. Her experience covering the Everett Massacre for the New York Evening Post in November 1916 served as a catalyst for her transformation from a privileged young liberal to a passionate thirty-something radical.

Strong was also a public opponent of the United States’ entry in World War I in 1917, a stance that led to the loss of her school board seat in a recall election organized by the all-male remainder of the board. After the dual experience of her witness to the Everett Massacre and her ousting from the Seattle School Board, she became a prominent public advocate for workers’ rights, especially during the 1919 Seattle General Strike. Her coverage of the strike was arguably the greatest source of her fame, especially her editorial published in the Seattle Union Record on February 6, 1919, two days before the beginning of the strike. There she famously proclaimed:

“We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead — NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!”

During the 1920s, disappointed by the failure of the Seattle General Strike and other failures of the U.S. labor movement in general, she turned her activist attentions to communism abroad, which led her to spend much of her later life in Russia and China in support of the respective revolutionary movements there. In 1958, at age 72, she finally settled in China, where she remained until her death in March 1970.

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: Murray Morgan, “Skid Road” (Viking Press, 1951; Ballantine Books, 1971; University of Washington Press, 1982); Roger Sale, “Seattle, Past to Present” (University of Washington Press, 1976); Anna Louise Strong, “I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American” (H. Holt and Co., 1935; Seal Press, 1979); Tracy B. Strong and Helene Keysser, “Right in Her Soul: The Life of Anna Louise Strong” (Random House, 1983); Paul Avrich, “Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America” (Princeton University Press, 1994; AK Press, 2005); Harvey O’Connor, “Revolution in Seattle: A Memoir” (Monthly Review Press, 1964; Haymarket Books, 2009).

March 5, 1917: The Wobblies on Trial

IWW member Thomas Tracy, photographed in Seattle, November 5, 1916.
Photo credit: Everett Public Library

The local labor cataclysm known as the Everett Massacre may have been sudden and swift, but its legal and political aftermath certainly wasn’t. The drama that began on November 5, 1916, stretched out over six months and reached its crescendo with a nationally-noted legal trial which began in King County Superior Court in Seattle on the date in focus here.

The Everett Massacre occurred when some 300 members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, a.k.a. “The Wobblies”) boarded a pair of ships in Seattle and headed north towards Everett, where they had planned a public demonstration that afternoon in support of striking shingle mill workers. When they arrived, they were met by a large group of some 200 hostile local police and citizen deputies. A spontaneous gunfire mêlée soon erupted, leaving seven dead and 50 wounded from among both Wobblies and deputies. The instigator of the first shot–whether Wobbly or deputy–was never identified.

The trial concerned the culpability of 74 Wobblies who had been arrested upon their return to Seattle from the scene of the massacre, incarcerated in the Snohomish County Jail in Everett, and charged with the murder of Jefferson Beard and C. O. Curtis, two citizen deputies who had been killed in the mêlée. The first of the Wobblies to be tried was Thomas Tracy, a prominent IWW leader at the time.

Anna Louise Strong, already known locally as a newspaper reporter with progressive sympathies, covered the trial for the New York Evening Post. Her experience hearing the story of the massacre during the trial’s course would be a crucial catalyst in her transformation from a “respectable” member of Seattle society into a lifelong rabble-rouser. Strong would write later, in her 1935 autobiography I Change Worlds:

“The news [concerning the events that instigated the massacre] was that at every stage the Everett police and private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking in their streets. The lumber guards on the dock had begun the shooting and continued firing as the Verona [one of the two IWW-charted ships] pulled away; yet none of them were arrested. The men on trial for murder were not individually shown to have even possessed a gun; it was enough that someone on their ship, a comrade or an agent provocateur, had fired.”

Strong’s name and political leanings came up in an intriguing way during the jury selection proceedings. Prosecuting Attorney Lloyd Black asked one prospective juror whether they knew Strong personally, much to Strong’s surprise. After that day’s adjournment, Strong asked Black why the question was asked. Black replied, “I heard Mr. Cooley ask it, so I did,” referring to the associate council for the case.

When Cooley was asked about the question, he replied, “Oh, I read in a newspaper that Miss Strong has written an article saying there was no use having a trial.”

The IWW benefited greatly from a national defense fund campaign they launched soon after the arrest of the 74 Wobblies. Using the funds raised, they retained Los Angeles attorney Fred H. Moore and former Seattle deputy prosecutor George F. Vanderveer, both of whom proved highly effective in the defense. In one intriguing twist at one point in the trial, forensic evidence indicated that Curtis was most likely killed by one of his fellow deputies, so that charge was quietly dropped. Another contributing factor explaining the length and complexity of the trial was the IWW’s perception of it as a microcosm of the class struggle they were then passionately committed to winning.

Tracy was finally acquitted on May 5, 1917. Shortly thereafter, all charges were dropped against the remaining 73 defendants and they were released from jail. There was no appeal, nor were charges ever made against any of the citizen deputies who may have murdered the five Wobblies who also died in the massacre.

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: “Selection Of Jurors To Try I.W.W. Started,” The Seattle Times, March 5, 1917, p. 1; “Picking Of Jury For I.W.W. Trial Moves Rapidly,” The Seattle Times, March 6, 1917, p. 1; “Jury To Try I.W.W. Case Not Yet Complete,” The Seattle Times, March 7, 1917, p. 3; Norman Clark, “Mill Town: A Social History of Everett” (University of Washington Press, 1970); Murray Morgan, “Skid Road” (Viking Press, 1951; Ballantine Books, 1971; University of Washington Press, 1982); Walker C. Smith, “The Everett Massacre: A History of the Class Struggle in the Lumber Industry” (IWW Publishing Bureau, 1918; Da Capo Press, 1971); Anna Louise Strong, “I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American” (H. Holt and Co., 1935; Seal Press, 1979).