In the early summer of 1917 the strike started.  Sweeping through the short log country it spread like wild-fire over nearly all the Northwestern lumber districts.  The tie-up was practically complete.  The industry was paralyzed.  The lumber trust, its mouth drooling in anticipation of the many millions it was about to make in profits, shattered high heaven with its cries of rage.  Immediately its loyal henchmen in the Wilson administration rushed to the rescue.  Profiteering might be condoned, moralized over or winked at, but militant labor unionism was a menace to the government and the prosecution of the war.  It must be crushed.  For was it not treacherous and treasonable for loggers to strike for living conditions when Uncle Sam needed the wood and the lumber interests the money?  So Woodrow Wilson and his coterie of political troglodytes from the slave-owning districts of the old South, started out to teach militant labor a lesson.  Corporation lawyers were assembled.  Indictments were made to order.  The bloodhounds of the Department of “Justice” were unleashed.  Grand Juries of “patriotic” business men were impaneled and did their expected work not wisely but too well.  All the gun-men and stool-pigeons of Big Business got busy.  And the opera bouffe of “saving our form of government” was staged.

Industrial Heretics and the White Terror

For a time it seemed as though the strikers would surely be defeated.  The onslaught was terrific, but the loggers held out bravely.  Workers were beaten and jailed by the hundreds.  Men were herded like cattle in blistering “bull-pens,” to be freed after months of misery, looking more like skeletons than human beings.  Ellensburg and Yakima will never be forgotten in Washington.  One logger was even burned to death while locked in a small iron-barred shack that had been dignified with the title of “jail.”  In the Northwest even the military were used and the bayonet of the soldier could be seen glistening beside the cold steel of the hired thug.  Union halls were raided in all parts of the land.  Thousands of workers were deported.  Dozens were tarred and feathered and mobbed.  Some were even taken out in the dead of night and hanged to railway bridges.  Hundreds were convicted of imaginary offenses and sent to prison for terms from one to twenty years.  Scores were held in filthy jails for as long as twenty-six months awaiting trial.  The Espionage Law, which never convicted a spy, and the Criminal Syndicalism Laws, which never convicted a criminal, were used savagely and with full force against the workers in their struggle for better conditions.  By means of newspaper-made war hysteria the profiteers of Big Business entrenched themselves in public opinion.  By posing as “100% Americans” (how stale and trite the phrase has become from their long misuse of it!) these social parasites sought to convince the nation that they, and not the truly American unionists whose backs they were trying to break, were working for the best interests of the American people.  Our form of government, forsooth, must be saved.  Our institutions must be rescued from the clutch of the “reds.”  Thus was the war-frenzy of their dupes lashed to madness and the guarantees of the constitution suspended as far as the working class was concerned.