The IWW Free Speech Fight

In the first decade of the nineteen hundreds, downtown Spokane had dozens of employment agencies lining the blocks west of the Northern Pacific depot. Workers called them job sharks. Loggers and miners needing work paid one dollar to be placed on a crew, and the agency would split that dollar with the employer, who would then fire the worker after a day or two and start the cycle again. One logging company reportedly hired three thousand men in a single winter to maintain a permanent crew of fifty.

The Industrial Workers of the World, the radical union known as the Wobblies, had been organizing against this system for years, using street corners as their stage. On January first, nineteen oh nine, the Spokane City Council made it illegal to speak publicly in the downtown fire district, the area that had burned in the eighteen eighty-nine fire. The ordinance was not subtle. It applied to labor organizers and to nobody else in practice.

The Wobblies responded with a campaign that was brilliant in its simplicity. They issued a nationwide call to fill the jails of Spokane. On November second, nineteen oh nine, Wobblies began taking turns stepping onto soapboxes and speaking until the police arrested them. The moment one person was hauled away, another stepped forward. By the end of November, more than five hundred people had been arrested and jailed, some held in an abandoned school building, others at Fort George Wright, because the city jail could not hold them all.

Among those arrested was nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, already a star of the labor movement. After her release on bond, she published an account accusing the city jail of operating as a, in her words, municipal brothel for police. That disclosure is on record and contested by city officials of the time, so we note it here as Flynn's documented accusation rather than established fact. The resulting scandal intensified national pressure on Spokane.

By March fourth, nineteen ten, the city repealed the ordinance and released the remaining prisoners. The Spokane Free Speech Fight became a template for labor and civil liberties organizing across the country. Historians have called it the first significant free speech fight in American history.