EVERETT — As Cinda Janik watched a rough version of "Verona: The Story of the Everett Massacre," she thought about how she could use the documentary in her class at Granite Falls Middle School.
Her students could easily relate to a film made in Snohomish County, and she said she could use the film to spur discussion on labor unions.
"This just makes education so much more exciting and real," Janik said.
Denise Ohio’s film is the first documentary done on the 1916 waterfront battle between citizen deputies and union members that left at least seven people dead.
The documentary is a work-in-progress, and the more than 300 people who attended a screening of the film Nov. 5 — the 87th anniversary of the incident — at the Everett Theatre saw Ohio only give the historical and social background that led up to the massacre.
The documentary stopped just before the shooting occurred.
Ohio has about 45 minutes more to add to the 75 minutes she screened last week. She hopes to premiere the complete film at the Everett Women’s Film Festival in March.
The screening raised about $1,000 toward the cost of completing the film. The screening also raised $1,000 each for the Everett Women’s Film Festival and the Snohomish County Labor Council’s Operation Shortfall, which raises money for local food banks.
Ohio said she was surprised the audience still had such strong emotions about the incident. One complaint was the film "wasn’t one-sided enough" in favor of the Wobblies, the radical union whose members were beaten by deputies several times before arriving on the steamer Verona Nov. 5, 1916, in hopes of holding a demonstration in Everett.
Ohio insisted the background of the massacre is more complicated than the common view in heavily unionized Everett of heroic Wobblies being massacred by evil deputies. It’s still not clear, she pointed out, who fired the first shot.
In fact, Ohio hopes to use 3-D computer imagery to present three re-creations of what could have happened: one in which a Wobblie fired the first shot, one in which a deputy did and one in which a gun went off accidentally.
"We’ll offer these scenarios and people watching it can make decisions for themselves on what happened, depending on what they know about human nature," she said.
At least five Wobblies and two deputies died in the shooting, although historians believe up to 12 other Wobblies also may have died.
Longtime Everett resident Susan Russell knew about the massacre before attending the screening. But she didn’t realize that, at about the same time, there was labor unrest throughout the world, caused in large part by enormous income gaps between business barons and workers.
"I thought she pulled it all together well," Russell said. "I learned a lot of history I wasn’t aware of."
David Chrisman, president of Historic Everett, said the documentary may be about one event in Everett’s history, but it helps viewers get a better sense of the struggles across the Northwest between wealthy mill owners and workers.
"It reminds us that what we have gone through in the past enriches what is going on now, and in the future," he said.
Reporter David Olson: 339-3452 or dolson@heraldnet.com.
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