Seattle General Strike of 1919

SEATTLE GENERAL STRIKE OF 1919. By 1918, Seattle’s labor movement had attained a degree of solidarity, militancy, and radicalism unrivaled on a citywide basis anywhere in the United States. Radical groups, notably the Industrial Workers of the World, played a powerful ideological role that affected the movement as a whole.

On 21 January 1919, shipyard workers struck to protest the denial of a wage hike that had been promised them once the war was over. Convinced that the shipyard strike was the opening battle against the open-shop offensive of the employers, overwhelming majorities in each of the more than one hundred constituent unions of the Central Labor Council voted to “shut it down” in solidarity with the shipyard workers.

In order to avoid hardship, and to intimidate the federal government and the “Eastern capitalists” who were seen by many to be the root of the problem, workers quickly decided they would have not only to close down the city; they would have to reopen it under labor’s management. Under the direction of a largely rank-and-file “Committee of Three Hundred” and a fifteen-person executive committee, plans were made for individual unions to carry out necessary tasks such as feeding the populace and policing the city. It was this decision to run the city that made the general strike one of the most radical events in U.S. labor history.

From 6 February through 11 February, labor indeed ran the city. Eventually, however, confusion over whom the strike was aimed at, combined with intense pressure from national officers of the American Federation of Labor (who were horrified at this “Bolshevik” action just when their organization was attaining respectability), forced the Committee of Three Hundred to declare the strike over at noon of 11 February. Workers returned to their jobs, “not feeling defeated but quite reasonably successful, glad they had struck, equally glad to call it off,” as the official General Strike History Committee later noted.

In the aftermath of this living demonstration of the feasibility of workers’ control, the future of radical unionism in Seattle looked bright. A number of workers’ cooperatives opened; the circulation of the Union Record, labor’s first daily newspaper, mushroomed; a newly organized Farmer-Labor Party replaced the Democrats as the second largest party in the Puget Sound area; and a number of militant demonstrations took place, including the refusal of longshoremen to load weapons for delivery to the forces fighting against the Russian Revolution.

But with the closing of the shipyards in mid-1919 (since the wartime need for ships had ended), Seattle was plunged into a depression perhaps twice as deep as anywhere else in the economically troubled country. Many of the cooperatives went under—as did many capitalist enterprises—and the resulting high unemployment led to job competition and political fissures among workers.

Although some accounts judge the general strike a “failure,” the truth is more complex. The shipyard strike was certainly lost, and the shipyards themselves closed soon after. Yet despite the severe depression, wages and working conditions in Seattle remained relatively favorable, arguably because the general strike served as a warning to employers. The strike also remained a cultural legacy to the Seattle labor movement through the dark days of the twenties; ironically, its militancy may have helped Dave Beck and other union organizers sell business unionism to the employers as an alternative to dealing with radicals.

The strike had greater implications as well. It has been cited as a factor in the Winnipeg general strike several months later, and in encouraging the creation of the American Communist Party. Most important, it was the first great radical event that tied unionists in the United States to the worldwide post–World War I radical wave.

Friedheim, Robert L. The Seattle General Strike. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018 [1964].

The Fuse. Seattle 1919 [sound recording]. Middletown, CT: Fuse Music, 1986.

History Committee of the General Strike Committee. Seattle General Strike. Seattle: Left Bank Books, 2012.

O’Connor, Harvey. Revolution in Seattle. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964.

Root and Branch, eds. The Rise of the Workers’ Movements. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1975.

Seattle General Strike Project, University of Washington. http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/strike/index.shtml

Strong, Anna Louise. I Change Worlds. New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937.

Winslow, Cal. Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919. New York: Monthly Review, 2020.