When Workers Stopped Seattle
The Seattle General Strike of 1919 is a forgotten and misunderstood part of American history. But it shows that workers have the power to shut down whole cities — and to run them in our interests.
Seattle General Strike participants leaving the shipyard after going on strike, January 21, 1919.Webster & Stevens / Wikimedia
On February 6, 1919, at 10 AM, Seattle’s workers struck. All of them.
The strike was in support of roughly thirty-five thousand shipyard workers, then in conflict with the city’s shipyard owners and the federal government’s US Shipping Board, the latter still enforcing wartime wage agreements. Silence settled on the city. “Nothing moved but the tide,” recalled the young African American, Earl George, just demobilized at nearby Camp Lewis.
Seattle’s workers simply put down their tools. It was, however, no ordinary strike. There had been nothing like it in the United States before, nor since. In doing so, they virtually took control of the city. Anna Louise Strong, writing in the Union Record, announced that labor “will feed the People . . . . Labor will care for the babies and the sick . . . . Labor will preserve order . . . . ” And indeed it did, for five February days.
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