AT THE DAWN of the twentieth century, political change and social and moral reform were in the air in the Pacific Northwest. On the side of politics, the two-party system of Republicans versus Democrats had already been seriously jolted. The first jolt had come at state and county levels, where the rise of Grangerism was a cause of anxiety to the politicians of both parties. This movement had not spread as rapidly in Washington as in Oregon, but who knew when it might? Or, if not Grangerism, then some other movement of similar aim. Ranchers had had more than enough of selling wheat at fifty cents per bushel, while railroad freight rates were apparently based on what the traffic would bear and railroad-owned elevators made ruinous charges for storage. Grangerism offered a kind of agrarian brotherhood that was more or less the rural equivalent of an urban fraternal society, but with a more definite economic slant. Grangers were against monopolies, grasping moneylenders, avaricious middlemen. First, last, and always they were for lower freight rates. They were largely in favor of Prohibition, and they viewed the enfranchisement of women with friendly eye.
As early as the nineties, Inland Empire politicians had become definitely aware of the pressures this organized brotherhood of the plow could bring to bear. Then along came Populism to strike at vested interests wherever it would hurt most. The new movement gathered into its fold many Grangers as well as restless labor groups, small businessmen, and particularly in North Idaho and contiguous territory, mining groups interested in the free coinage of silver. With the fusion in 1896 of Populists and Free Silver Democrats led by William Jennings Bryan, this many-sided political unrest reached its culmination. Party allegiance reached rock bottom, and traditional two-party control was put on the skids not only in Washington but all over the Pacific Northwest. It continued to slip in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho long after the nation as a whole had returned to a considerable degree of political normalcy. In those states the insurgent groups, though not long in the majority, gradually forced through long overdue legislation, and set in motion such political experiments as the direct primary, the initiative, the referendum and the recall. Washington inaugurated railroad control by commission and passed a workmen’s compensation act. It was rocked by Prohibition and Equal Suffrage agitation, both of which had hard sledding, but triumphed in the end. Full enfranchisement for women did not arrive until 1910, and then only after years of agitation and sporadic legislative action upset by adverse court decisions, which for a long time limited to school elections the right of women to vote. Prohibition became the law in 1914.
In this soil of experimentation and reform, the Progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt had readily taken root. In 1903 he was royally entertained in Spokane and pronounced the city “bully.” In 1912 he carried the State of Washington by a comfortable majority. In 1916, the Inland Empire, contrary to the trend west of the Cascades, was still sufficiently set on political regeneration to score a majority vote for another Progressive, this time of Democratic stamp, Woodrow Wilson. It was in the light of such events that a penetrating Washington author of later years summed up the political motto of the Inland Empire as “Divided We Stand!”{102}
In Spokane at the dawn of the century, the pioneer epoch was past; the adolescent recklessness and extravagance of early mining years was fading out. The community began to eye the local political and moral situation with growing penetration and concern.
It had need to do so. Since the early years of improvisation, when public office had necessarily been imposed upon whomsoever happened to be available, the city had become more and more deeply imbedded in the two-party rut. Mayors and councilmen rode into the city hall on the Democratic band wagon or as standard bearers of the Grand Old Party, rather than as public servants devoted to civic welfare. They were definitely for progress if by that was meant broad paved streets, spectacular lighting, fruit fairs and industrial expositions, a fine new city hall—anything that proclaimed the city as a miracle of up-and-coming-ness. They could fight with the Great Northern railway over elevated grade crossings tending to offend the eye, and they willingly lent a hand to the thriving Chamber of Commerce in its perpetual struggle with the railroads for better rates. To do so was to fight foreign “interests” and advance local financial prosperity. But toward local millionaires, attitudes were, to say the least, ingratiating; toward vice there was definitely a hands-off policy—drinking, gambling, and prostitution was practically uncontrolled. Social welfare got scant attention, charity and related matters were largely left to religious organizations, to the hospitals{103} and other institutions supported by the churches, and to the ladies with their Benevolent Society, their Women’s Exchange, their Children’s Home, and like charities. Personal peculation on the part of council members following the fire had roused widespread public ire, since profiting from disaster is apt to be regarded anywhere as the lowest form of graft. On the other hand, hidden graft in the form of slush money, railroad passes, and special favors was regarded as a kind of “squeeze” inherent in the transaction of public business.
Since the city’s economy was not primarily industrial, labor had not become the problem it was in the near-by Coeur d’Alenes, where a condition of outright labor war had for some time been the rule. Population in Spokane was predominantly native American, British-Canadian, Scandinavian—independent but not radical folk, middle class, and reasonably prosperous when not actually wealthy, interested in their families, their lawns and gardens, their cozy, well-equipped homes, their public schools, their churches and lodges.
Such a population may be slow to act. In Spokane, it had for a time been submerged by the mining influx. By the beginning of the century, however, it began to get on its social and moral feet, thanks not a little to the influence of religious and women’s organizations. The Young Men’s Christian Association was growing in numbers and social activity; women’s clubs, of which there was an abundance, began to take a definite interest in the local political and social scene as well as in culture spelled with a capital “C.” “White Ribboners,” following the national leadership of women like Frances E. Willard and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, spread the gospel of woman suffrage and social reform along with Prohibition.
The latter movement became sufficiently strong to place a candidate of the party in the mayoralty campaign. While not elected, the candidate won a sufficient number of votes to underline heavily the new forces that would soon have to be reckoned with in the local political situation. By 1903 a Municipal League had a candidate in the field. He was also defeated, but by a margin uncomfortably small to the eyes of politicians committed to the idea of letting well enough alone. Three years later, a Law Enforcement League was able to bring about impeachment proceedings against the then Democratic mayor for failure to enforce Sunday closing of saloons. A Council vote of six to four quashed the impeachment and brought defeat for the League, but again the affair was of importance as showing which way the wind was blowing.
In 1907 a Good Citizens’ League joined with Republicans in electing a reform mayor, who the following year succeeded in enforcing Sunday closing of saloons and with them, three theatres of bad repute. With this, commented the city’s best-known early historian,{104} “Spokane passed forever from a stage that was highly picturesque, but unsuited to an aspiring city of the modern mold, later to rank as a social, educational and amusement center of the better kind.”
At this point, Billy Sunday arrived with his gospel of the “sawdust trail.” Billy had a proper name. In full it was The Reverend William G. Sunday; but few ever called him that. An ex-baseball player turned evangelist, thundering his gospel of the sawdust trail, he burst upon Spokane with telling effect. No one ever more effectively combined the language of the common man and the sporting world with the conventional phraseology of religion than this “besom of righteousness.” The word “trail” was as firmly planted in Western speech as “home” and “mother.” To a lumber jack lost in the woods, “to hit the trail” meant finding the way our; to the weary prospector, taking the road home; to the community at large, entering upon a new course and following it. The bare earth of Billy’s huge tent tabernacle was strewn with sawdust, and when, deserting the second-hand pulpit, the preacher acrobat leaned far out from his six-foot high platform and with hand extended invited repentant sinners to hit the sawdust trail with determination and resolve, the effect was electric. Men and women, old and young, the mildly unregenerate with the dissolute, pressed forward to receive Billy’s powerful handshake and his hearty “God bless you.”
Billy’s gospel was as direct as it was simple: “Quit your cussedness; confess Christ; get busy working for him.” On a Sabbath day in January, 1909, ten thousand men within his tabernacle heard him rip into the saloon, while on the outside five thousand more staged a near riot in the clamor for ad-mission. Thousands of “conversion” cards had already been turned in by repentant sinners on their way through the saw-dust to grasp Billy’s hand. That was fine, but good works was the next step. By the end of the revival a hundred citizens were ready to charter a special train to carry them in the company of the evangelist to Olympia, there to present the Spokane County legislative delegation with a local option petition bearing the signatures of eight thousand citizens.
A somewhat embarrassing accompaniment of Billy’s revival was an overwhelming influx of unemployed men into the city. Roundabout Spokane were plenty of the foot-loose who, by choice or through inability to secure jobs after the financial setback of 1907-1908, were on the lookout for winter quarters. The benches in the tabernacle, opened as a refuge, served as beds for four hundred the first night, for six hundred the second, and so on until the number passed the thousand mark. In desperation the sponsoring Ministerial Association had to limit hospitality to free sleeping quarters for all corners, and breakfast for four hundred only. An appeal to the chief of police elicited readiness to aid; but the municipal housing capacity was limited to three hundred.
Fortunately, the return of warm weather saved the immediate situation, but not before Spokane had won an unenviable reputation as a meeting place for knights of the road. This reputation may have helped, in the following November, to bring about the city’s first really serious tilt with labor.
The group which precipitated the trouble was that violent and anarchistic new arrival on the labor scene, the Industrial Workers of the World, more often referred to by unsympathetic citizens as “The Bummery,” or the “I Won’t Work” offshoot of trade unionism. Its strength and spirit rested partly in such leaders as Eugene V. Debs{105} and William D. Haywood. The Western Federation of Miners, so powerful in the Coeur d’Alenes, initially regarded it with favor, but even that far from conservative labor union was unable very long to hold with I.W.W. philosophy and activities, and the affiliation was quickly renounced.
Nevertheless, by gathering into its fold malcontents from varied sources, the I.W.W. waxed strong in the Pacific North-west where it rapidly became the outstanding exponent of direct action and the class struggle. Its greatest appeal was to the foot-loose and migratory. In Spokane, a small membership, made up chiefly of floaters from harvest fields to lumber camps, in the fall of 1908 set up headquarters with the avowed intention of making relentless war on local labor sharks, those less than scrupulous employment agencies that preyed upon migratory labor in various ways, but principally by charging substantial fees for placement in seasonable jobs that not infrequently vanished almost upon the worker’s arrival. When the local I.W.W. group engineered noisy street meetings led by soap-box orators, the City Council, presumably at the behest of the employment agencies, passed an ordnance prohibiting street speaking within the fire limits. For a time the meetings languished. But, unfortunately, the ordnance cut two ways. When the Salvation Army pointed out that its work was being interfered with, the Council reconsidered the matter and in the late summer passed a new ordnance which exempted the Army from its provisions. Such an ordnance, the I.W.W. leaders pointed out, was rank discrimination, both unjust and illegal. They took the matter into the courts and, while the lawyers wrangled, the street war was resumed.
Meantime, large numbers of Pacific Northwest “wobblies” made their way to a Chicago convention shouting in raucous chorus, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!” En route, they held street meetings à la the Salvation Army, singing and passing the hat, and on the return trip stopped over in Missoula, Montana, to stage a free-speech campaign there; for like Spokane, that city had an obnoxious anti-street-meeting ordnance.
The spark plug of the Missoula affair was a handsome, auburn-haired girl of nineteen, later dubbed by no less a person than Heywood Broun the Joan, of Arc of American labor. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn—the Gurley was her mother’s family name—came of good Irish stock early driven from the Emerald Isle to New England, like others upon whose heads a price had been set for being too obviously “agin the government.” Father Flynn worked his way through Dartmouth, became a civil engineer, espoused the cause of Socialism. While his daughter was still growing up, he was edged out of the Massachusetts labor group in which he had been an intelligent but conservative leader by a clique for whom Socialism failed to provide the direct action for which they lusted. Little more than a child, Elizabeth (better known to the public as Gurley) joined the ranks of the revolutionary faction. By the age of fifteen, she had already won a reputation as a street-corner orator who preached with devastating eloquence a labor gospel as fiery and compelling as her own personality.
A reporter who happened upon one of her early appearances in Philadelphia wrote a story about it that made the front pages.{106} The meeting, he recorded, was bogged down by a stodgy speaker when a pretty girl, slim, broad of forehead, and with flashing, mischievous eyes, took over. Immediately a crowd assembled. Corner loungers, drunks, women of the street, children—all stood hypnotized as phrases from Mirabeau, the poetry of Byron, the prose of George Eliot, and the social philosophy of Maxim Gorky flowed from the lips of the girl, who salted her impassioned tirade with flashes of saucy patter and pungent wit.
For Gurley such a performance was nothing unusual. Even as a high school pupil she had known how to secure an audience. Refused permission to read before the school an essay she had written which was far from complimentary to public education, she read it to an appreciative crowd on a near-by street. “What,” inquired the judge before whom she was haled, “do you know about education?” “A lot,” flashed the totally unabashed orator. “I’m getting it!” When it came to dealing with policemen, she was equally ready. She conquered by sheer force of youth, ridicule, and Irish wit.
In the efficient hands of this young crusader, the Missoula free-speech campaign brought results rather quickly. The city, its jails overflowing with unwelcome guests yanked in relays from their soap boxes, ingloriously gave up its attempt at enforcement of its obnoxious ordnance. The victorious I.W.W.’s decided to move on Spokane, there to stage a repeat performance. In the capital city of the Inland Empire fellow workers were already engaged in a free-speech campaign. They would welcome reinforcements. Forward march!
There were other reasons for descending on Spokane. There men out of work or weekending in town could more easily be reached with I.W.W. propaganda than in isolated lumber, mining, or construction camps, where foremen often created difficulties. Moreover, there was the matter of the hated hiring halls. Finally, winter was coming on, and the men of Gurley’s army, along with others of their ilk, had to hole up somewhere, and chances of shelter were better in town than on the open road.
On the day of their release from jail in Missoula, the I.W.W.’s held a final series of street meetings. Then, when night fell, they stormed back to the jail demanding hospitality for one more night. Missoula bade them a relieved good-by when they finally set out for Spokane via boxcar and “side door Pullman.”
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was the natural choice for leadership of the expedition. She could talk; she could also write. If editors of the crusading army’s newssheet were jailed, she would be perfectly capable of taking over. She was fearless, a born leader, and an excellent strategist as well. As the Missoula crusaders got under way with Gurley as their Joan, word was sent to I.W.W.’s throughout the Pacific Northwest to join them.
Into Spokane swarmed a noisy, tatterdemalion horde. When the speaking began, demonstrators were thrown into jail at the rate of more than a hundred per night; but every day more recruits arrived to take their places. Many were sincere and gallant fighters in what they took to be an almost holy cause; all were hard-bitten, and steadfast in the face of vituperation and danger. They led the police a merry chase. No sooner did the officers of the law break up a meeting on one corner than a street meeting sprouted somewhere else. Streams of icy water from a hose had only temporary effect. Such measures sent both demonstrators and jeering onlookers scurrying, but scarcely was that accomplished when the hose cart had to be hurried to another location. Meanwhile Gurley was everywhere—a lithe and dashing figure in open-neck blouse, red tie, and broad sombrero. She stood in no fear of policemen. Why should she? All they could do was arrest her, and that didn’t hurt. It had happened to her before and she knew. She laughed in the officers’ faces, joked with them. They weren’t a bad lot. They only did what they had to do. On the whole she was sorry for them.
Soon, city and county jails became inadequate to house the champions of free speech who, when incarcerated, made night hideous with their singing, shouting, and jeering. Fisticuffs between street orators and police were not unknown and ringleaders were said to have been given sweatbox treatment by jailers. Fort Wright furnished accommodations for some of those taken into custody, and finally an abandoned school building was put into use for the rest. Those sentenced for thirty days must either work on the rock pile or exist on bread and water. When most of the schoolhouse prisoners chose the latter, the injustice and inhumanity of “Barbarous Spokane” made headlines in the International Socialist Review: “Four hundred men and women of the ranks of labor, [using the weapons of] passive resistance, [lay] on the bare floor in a jail, slowly starving; their emaciated bodies...try to rise after thirty days of torture,...no bed, no blankets,...ice-cold cells.”{107}
The Independent, nationally known liberal weekly, investigated “Barbarous Spokane.”{108} The reports, it stated, were distorted. Actually, food was adequate, but the prisoners had gone on a hunger strike; when required to cut their own wood or go cold, they had chosen cold; the I.W.W.’s had not been denied the right of free speech, inasmuch as the mayor had offered the use of side streets or a readily accessible vacant lot. Free speech, the editorial concluded, was a right to be exercised under reasonable restrictions.
Gurley and her friends could not agree to any such interpretation of Constitutional privilege. She was finally arrested; but being a woman, and a sprightly, witty, and clever one to boot, was treated leniently and released on what was announced as a promise not again to violate the ordnance.
After a further month of continuous trouble, Gurley was rearrested together with four other leaders, this time on conspiracy charges. In justice court Gurley was convicted and sentenced to three months in the county jail. She did not serve her term, however. For one thing, she had too many sympathizers, even among some who had little liking for her cause. Reporters particularly were amused and won over. She was still scarcely more than a girl. Why persecute her? Others thought the ordnance a rather silly one. Spokane’s streets were broad enough to prevent any traffic tie-up. Why not let the invaders talk themselves out? It would relieve their pent-up emotions and hurt no one. Gurley’s case was appealed and a verdict of not guilty was returned, though a male co-worker was not so fortunate.
When nearly three months had passed, the free-speech crusade more or less petered out. The city was tired of it, and citizens fed up with its cost. On their part, the pilgrims of labor became acutely aware of the early Inland Empire spring summoning them to Hallelujah choruses about open fires under the firs and pines—or even jobs in field or forest. By March, city authorities were ready to agree to the demands of the invaders to the extent of granting freedom of assemblage, the right to print and sell I. W. W. literature and to rent quarters in the city without consequent intimidation by landlords. They also agreed to the gradual release of prisoners. The ultimate outcome was repeal of what many thoughtful citizens had come to think was an ill-advised ordnance.
As for labor’s Joan of Arc, the impending arrival of a son put a temporary end to strenuous campaigning. Gurley returned East to live alone with her child in a shabby section of the Bronx. Her Missoula husband had not proved to be a congenial helpmate, she explained, so she had divorced him. The Pacific Northwest saw her no more, though for long years she was headlined in various places where Eastern labor fought by means of the strike or through the courts. Spokane had definitely lost its first feminine crusader, but another was coming up, this time more nearly home-grown. That is another story.