The Nineteen Nineteen General Strike: Five Days That Frightened the Nation

At ten o'clock in the morning on February sixth, nineteen nineteen, sixty-five thousand workers in Seattle stopped working at the same moment. They left the shipyards, the restaurants, the laundries, the hotels, the machine shops, the barbershops. Every trade and industry union in the city had voted to walk out in solidarity with the metal tradesmen at the Puget Sound shipyards, who were disputing a wage settlement handed down by the federal Wage Adjustment Board. The metal workers wanted more. The federal board said no. The rest of Seattle's union movement said: then we all stop.

No American city had seen a general strike of this scope. The workers had prepared. Union committees organized a parallel city: milk wagons were permitted to run, but only to hospitals and households with children under five. Laundry service continued for hospitals. Cafeterias operated by union members served meals at cost. The garbage did not run. The trolleys did not run. Downtown Seattle, which had never been quiet on a weekday, went quiet.

Mayor Ole Hanson did not take the philosophical view. He called it Bolshevism. He telegraphed the federal government and demanded troops. Newspapers across the country ran headlines about revolution. The Seattle Star's editorial on February seventh said: "STOP BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE." The New York Times compared Seattle to Petrograd. Federal authorities opened Red Scare investigations into the union leadership.

The strike lasted five days. It ended without achieving its wage goals. The metal workers did not get their raise. The union leadership voted to return to work. Mayor Hanson claimed personal credit for suppressing a communist revolution, a claim the historical record does not support. He parlayed the publicity into a national lecture tour.

What the strike planted, the idea that organized labor could actually govern a city in a crisis, outlasted its defeat. Seattle's union culture, its progressive municipal politics, its instinct toward collective action in moments of economic pressure, trace in part back to those five days in February of nineteen nineteen when sixty-five thousand people made a point and proved it.