A Massacre and a New Law

But no really important event occurred until 1916.  At this time the union loggers, organized in the Industrial Workers of the World, had started a drive for membership around Puget Sound.  Loggers and mill hands were eager for the message of Industrial Unionism.  Meetings were well attended and the sentiment in favor of the organization was steadily growing.  The A.F. of L. shingle weavers and longshoremen were on strike and had asked the I.W.W. to help them secure free speech in Everett.  The ever-watchful lumber interests decided the time to strike had again arrived.  The events of “Bloody Sunday” are too well known to need repeating here.  Suffice to say that after a summer replete with illegal beatings and jailings five men were killed in cold blood and forty wounded in a final desperate effort to drive the union out of the city of Everett, Washington.  These unarmed loggers were slaughtered and wounded by the gunfire of a gang of business men and plug-uglies of the lumber interests.  True to form, the lumber trust had every union man in sight arrested and seventy-four charged with the murder of a gunman who had been killed by the cross-fire of his own comrades.  None of the desperadoes who had done the actual murdering was ever prosecuted or even reprimanded.  The charge against the members of the Industrial Workers of the World was pressed.  The case was tried in court and the Industrialists declared “not guilty.”  George Vanderveer was attorney for the defense.

The lumber interests were infuriated at their defeat, and from this time on the struggle raged in deadly earnest.  Almost everything from mob law to open assassination had been tried without avail.  The execrated One Big Union idea was gaining members and power every day.  The situation was truly alarming.  Their heretofore trustworthy “wage plugs” were showing unmistakable symptoms of intelligence.  Workingmen were waking up.  They were, in appalling numbers, demanding the right to live like men.  Something must be done something new and drastic—­to split asunder this on-coming phalanx of industrial power.

But the gun-man-and-mob method was discarded, temporarily at least, in favor of the machinations of lumber trust tools in the law making bodies.  Big Business can make laws as easily as it can break them—­and with as little impunity.  So the notorious Washington “Criminal Syndicalism” law was devised.  This law, however, struck a snag.  The honest-minded governor of the state, recognizing its transparent character and far-reaching effects, promptly vetoed the measure.  After the death of Governor Lister the criminal syndicalism law was passed, however, by the next State Legislature.  Since that time it has been used against the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party and even common citizens not affiliated with any of these organizations.  The criminal syndicalism law registers the high water mark of reaction.  It infringes more on the liberties of the people than any of the labor-crushing laws that blackened Russia during the dynasty of the Romanoffs.  It would disgrace the anti-Celestial legislation of Hell.