The Massacre

  • Julie Muhlstein / Herald Columnist
  • Wednesday, November 7, 2001 9:00pm
  • Local News

Everett’s darkest day still proves haunting

Julie Muhlstein

Herald Columnist

You can live in a place 20 years and think you know it, or hear a reference to the Everett Massacre and think you understand it.

I’ve been here 20 years. I thought I understood.

In my mind, the waterfront strife known as the Everett Massacre was a cut-and-dried tale. On Nov. 5, 1916, the city’s powers that be took aim at Wobblies bent on workers’ rights.

At least seven people died in the shooting, including five members of the Industrial Workers of the World and two citizen deputies. It’s likely more IWW men fell in the bay and their bodies were later secretly moved.

End of story?

Eighty-five years after it happened, I sat in a packed meeting room at the Snohomish County PUD to hear David Dilgard, Everett Public Library history specialist and local treasure, interpret the infamous event. In words and pictures, dry history came to life.

I began to grasp the complexity of a violent incident that left this city with a lasting stain.

Dilgard, a 1963 graduate of Cascade High School, recalled that when he was a kid, two library books were off limits. One was the racy "Peyton Place." The other was "The Everett Massacre," by Walker C. Smith, published in 1918 by the IWW.

"It was a forbidden topic," Dilgard said of the massacre. "Sometimes a teacher would ask kids to do a report on it. You could look at the Walker Smith book, but only in the library."

Dilgard said the book painted city leaders as demons, particularly Donald McRae, the Snohomish County sheriff who deputized more than 200 citizens during a bitter 1916 strike by the shingle weavers union.

The strike had brought the Wobblies, as IWW members were known, to Everett, where the group took to the streets to spread their message of one big union for all.

Ironically, Dilgard said, McRae had deep roots in labor. He had served as secretary in the shingle weavers union.

Everett was already a trade union town, but the radical Wobblies sought to include unskilled workers and ultimately do away with what Dilgard called "the master class." Using the Everett strike as an entry point — and some say using local workers as pawns — Wobblies began speaking at the northwest corner of Hewitt and Wetmore avenues, which led to head-busting by local law enforcement.

Before the killings, 40 IWW street speakers had been taken by deputies to Beverly Park, where they were brutally beaten and run out of town. The Sunday of the shootings, Wobblies were to have returned for a downtown Everett demonstration to show their solidarity.

Exactly what happened that Nov. 5 may never be known.

About 300 Wobblies boarded the passenger steamers Verona and Calista in Seattle and headed for Port Gardner Bay. Citizen deputies were armed and ready, having heard that anarchists were coming to burn Everett’s mills.

As the Verona pulled alongside City Dock at the foot of Hewitt, a shot was fired.

"It doesn’t matter who fired first," Dilgard said. "Some idiot squeezed off a shot. It could well have been an accident.

"It was always a bluff, both sides were bluffing," Dilgard added. "There was no place for either side to back down. It was a bonfire waiting to explode."

Killed in the bloodiest battle in Northwest labor history were Wobblies Hugo Gerlot, Abraham Rabinowitz, Gus Johnson, John Looney and Felix Baran. When the shooting stopped, deputies Jefferson Beard, a family man well liked in the community, and Charles Curtis lay dying.

The steamers returned to Seattle, where 74 Wobblies were arrested and brought to the Snohomish County Jail. Only one, Thomas Tracy, was charged with the murders of Curtis and Beard. Represented by Wobbly lawyer Charles Vanderveer, Tracy was acquitted.

"Out of that whole event, there was only one prosecution and no convictions. That’s pretty interesting," said Royce Ferguson, an Everett attorney who in 1989 wrote "Bloody Sunday," a play about the Everett Massacre.

Ferguson has long had in interest in what he described as "Everett’s claim to fame in a macabre sort of way."

The city’s darkest hour did put it on the map.

Dilgard said Everett is mentioned as no place for the working man in John Dos Passos’ classic trilogy "U.S.A." The novels explore class struggle in the early 20th century. Beat generation writer Jack Kerouac, influenced by Dos Passos, also referred to the killings.

The Everett Massacre haunted the city for generations. Someone in Monday night’s audience said her father was shunned by Everett society in the 1950s when he researched the bloody event.

Haunting, too, were the faces flashing from Dilgard’s slide projector at the end of his program, mug shots of the 74 men arrested that day. Dilgard identified each by trade — a painter, a blacksmith, a cook, a logger. In the pictures they look proud, defiant, stunned.

Among them was Jack Miller, a Seattle man who lived long enough to tell Dilgard his story and take part in massacre commemorations. He died in 1986.

Dilgard also interviewed Guy Buck, who had admitted firing on the Verona.

"We talked to people on both sides. They had a standard version they’d been telling for years and years," Dilgard said. "If you spent time with them, something broke down. There was still a whole lot of trauma and pain there."

Contact Julie Muhlstein via e-mail at muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com, write to her at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206, or call 425-339-3460.

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