Seattle General Strike
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The Seattle General Strike of February 6 to February 11, 1919, was a general work stoppage by over 65,000 workers in the city of Seattle, Washington. Dissatisfied workers in several unions began the strike to gain higher wages after two years of World War I wage controls. Most other local unions, including members of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), joined the walkout. Although the strike was non-violent and lasted less than a week, government officials, the press, and much of the public viewed the strike as a radical attempt to subvert US institutions. Paranoid reactions called it the work of Bolsheviks and other radicals inspired by "un-American" ideologies, making it the first concentrated eruption of the anti-Red hysteria that characterized the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920.
End of the general strike
Three simultaneous movements brought the strike to an end. Mayor Hanson increased the police and military forces available to enforce order, though there was no disorder, and possibly to take the place of striking workers. Union officials, especially those more senior and those at higher levels of the labor movement, feared that using the general strike as a tactic would fail and set back their organizing efforts. Union members, perhaps seeing the strength of the forces arrayed against them, perhaps mindful of their union leaders concerns began to go back to work.
Mayor Hanson had federal troops available and stationed nine hundred fifty sailors and marines across the city by February 7. He added 600 men to the police force and hired 2,400 special deputies, students from the University of Washington for the most part.[5] On February 7, Mayor Hansen threatened to use 1,500 police and 1,500 troops to replace striking workers the next day, but the strikers assumed this was an empty threat and were proved correct.[6] The Mayor continued his rhetorical attack on February 9, saying that the "sympathetic strike was called in the exact manner as was the revolution in Petrograd."[7]
The international offices of some of the unions and the national leadership of the AFL began to exert pressure on the General Strike Committee and individual unions to end the strike.[8] Some locals gave in to this pressure and returned to work. The executive committee of the General Strike Committee, pressured by the AFL and international labor organizations, proposed ending the general strike at midnight on February 8, but their recommendation was voted down by the General Strike Committee.[8] On February 8, some streetcar operators returned to work and restored some critical city transportation services. Seattle's main department store reopened as well.[9] Then teamsters and newsboys returned to work.[10] On February 10, the General Strike Committee voted to end the general strike on February 11 and by noon on that day it was over.[11] It stated its reasons: "Pressure from international officers of unions, from executive committees of unions, from the 'leaders' in the labor movement, even from those very leaders who are still called 'Bolsheviki' by the undiscriminating press. And, added to all these, the pressure upon the workers themselves, not of the loss of their own jobs, but of living in a city so tightly closed."
The city had been effectively paralyzed for five days, but the general strike collapsed as labor reconsidered its effectiveness under pressure from senior labor leaders and their own obvious failure to match the Mayor's propaganda in the war for public opinion. The shipyard strike in support of which the general strike had been called persisted.
?So WI it had turned Violent?Aftermath
Hanson, July 1, 1919
Immediately following the general strike's end, thirty-nine IWW members were arrested as "ringleaders of anarchy", despite their playing a marginal role in the development of events.
Seattle's mayor Ole Hanson took credit for ending the strike and was hailed by some of the press. He resigned a few months later and toured the country giving lectures on the dangers of "domestic bolshevism." He earned $38,000 in 7 months, 5 times his annual salary as mayor.[12] He agreed that the general strike was a revolutionary event. In his view, the fact that it was peaceful proved its revolutionary nature and intent. He wrote:[13]
The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact... The intent, openly and covertly announced, was for the overthrow of the industrial system; here first, then everywhere... True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practised in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. To succeed, it must suspend everything; stop the entire life stream of a community... That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt–no matter how achieved.
In Congress, the U.S. Senate, on February 4, just a day after the general strike was announced and a day before it began, voted to expand the work of its Overman Judiciary Subcommittee from investigating German spies to Bolshevik propaganda. The Committee launched a month of hearings on February 11, the day the strike collapsed. Its sensational report detailed Bolshevik atrocities and the threat of domestic agitators bent on revolution and the abolition of private property. The labor radicalism represented by the Seattle General Strike fit neatly into its conception of the threat American institutions faced.[14]