A warm thanks for this trip down memory lane. I learned this story,
along with many other bloody resistance tales, at my Dad's knee.
Despite a period of "better years", we are once again watching our
Working Class being beaten and bloodied by those descendants of the
Establishments Bully Boys.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/3/16, Paul Wick <wickps@gmail.com> wrote:
> This Saturday is the 100th anniversary of the Everett Massacre, a shootout
> between Wobblies and deputies during a shingle-makers' strike. "100 Years
> Ago Tomorrow," a one-night concert, features musicians Jason Webley, Tomo
> Nakayama, Kevin Murphy of the Moondoggies and others.
>
> By Brendan Kiley
> Seattle times staff reporter
>
> One hundred years ago this Saturday, a steamboat called the Verona chugged
> north from Seattle and pulled alongside a dock in Everett -- then quickly
> became a bloody battlefield in the U.S. labor movement.
> The Verona was packed with around 250 Wobblies (activists from a union
> called the Industrial Workers of the World) coming to face down an angry
> sheriff and hundreds of armed men he'd deputized during a vicious,
> months-long strike by local shingle makers. Nobody knows who shot first. But
> soon at least seven people were dead -- two deputies, the rest Wobblies --
> other people were missing and newspapers were writing headlines about "the
> Everett Massacre."
> "It's amazing to me that it wasn't worse," said musician Jason Webley, who
> spent months reading through archives -- books, articles, court transcripts
> -- to commission songs for "100 Years Ago Tomorrow," a commemorative concert
> featuring musicians from Everett (Kevin Murphy of the Moondoggies) to New
> York (composer Kate Copeland).
> Once the shootout started, Webley said, Wobblies rushed to the other side of
> the steamer, which nearly capsized. Some deputies on the dock were shot from
> behind by friendly fire. "Everybody," Webley said, "was responding out of
> fear."
> The Wobblies have a strong musical tradition, but Webley didn't want a night
> of covers from the union's Little Red Songbook . Instead, he studied the
> strike, looking for its odd details and unusual corners -- "places," he
> said, "where some songs could live." He purposefully chose musicians without
> strong ties to labor activism, shared what he'd found and let his guests
> take the reins.
> One, by Tomo Nakayama, is sung from the perspective of a 19-year-old on the
> Verona who caught the body of Wobbly Abraham Rabinowitz after he was shot in
> the head. "Cuts," a hauntingly soft song by Johanna Warren, is based on
> photographs and accounts of how often shingle makers lost fingers on the
> job: "They churn us up and spit us out/They couldn't give a damn about/The
> digits we are now without."
> Webley, who grew up in Mukilteo, said he'd vaguely heard of the Everett
> Massacre before the "100 Years" project. But the more he dug into the
> history, the more complicated things became.
> The angry sheriff, for example, had been a unionized shingle maker himself
> before getting elected -- but reportedly beat labor activists and stood by
> while his deputies did the same. One night, men with ax handles and clubs
> rounded up a few dozen Wobblies and made them run a gauntlet -- beating out
> teeth and breaking bones -- before forcing them to limp 30 miles back to
> Seattle. "People in farms a half-mile away could hear the screams," Webley
> said, "and came and saw all the blood."
> As the Verona left Seattle, Webley said, Everett started lighting up with
> rumors that "armed anarchists were coming to burn the town down ... but the
> main weapon they had was red pepper to throw in the faces of people beating
> them."
> Conor Casey, a labor archivist at the University of Washington, said young
> boom towns like Everett were volatile places, heavily polarized between
> "bosses, hired security and workers -- and not much of a middle class as a
> buffer."
> Nov. 5, 1916, was a disaster waiting to happen.
> It's fitting, Casey said, that "100 Years Ago Tomorrow" is a theatrical
> concert. "The Wobblies were so about culture creation," he said, with
> songbooks, newspapers and a long history of street-theatrics and satirical
> cartoons. "I call it the first punk rock -- it's got that irony, that
> sardonic take on the events of the day. It's current."
> --
> Brendan Kiley: 206-464-2507 or bkiley@seattletimes.com. On Twitter
> @brendankiley.
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
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