A Savvy Socialist

Contemporary newspaper coverage paints Washington’s last socialist lawmaker as a champion of ambitious left-wing policies with an eye for making strategic alliances to advance them.

31st Legislative District representative William H. Kingery was elected by voters in Washington State’s Mason County – eighty miles west of Seattle – in the same 1912 election cycle when labor leader Eugene Debs received 6 percent of the national popular vote in his run for president. For years, Debs had targeted Washington as prime territory for a proletarian takeover of state government that could, as he put it, “tax syndicates and land sharks out of the state.” In electing Kingery, 31st Legislative District voters had suddenly made a socialist pipe dream seem like a real possibility.

Early biographical details about Kingery are scant. His first quasi-public act was to enroll in Stanford University at the turn of the twentieth century. But after progressive professor Edward Alsworth Ross was terminated by Stanford admin in 1900 for advocating nationalization of US railroads, Kingery quit the prestigious college, moved to Washington in the ensuing decade, and got married. He was employed in the lumber industry, fathered several children with his wife, then became an active member in his timber workers’ union.

William Kingery spoke eloquently about the economic headwinds facing working families. “I myself have a wife and children,” he once explained, “and while I receive better wages than the average workman, we have not lived since we were married — we have just existed.” Kingery’s materialist diagnosis of the problems facing everyday Washingtonians found an audience in publications not known for their friendliness to leftist views. “That 9 million men and 8 million women are unmarried today in America because of low wages is the statement of W. H. Kingery,” summarized the Seattle Times.

A college dropout, Kingery was nonetheless a clever politician. When prominent progressive Ed J. Hanson pledged to run for the state legislature to take out an incumbent Republican in Mason County in 1912, area Democrats were excited to support him. Kingery secretly befriended the popular politician. On the verge of the filing deadline for local races, he then secured Hanson’s endorsement before announcing his own bid to represent Washington’s 31st Legislative District. Local Democrats were forced to vote for the socialist if they wanted to oust the Republican.

Kingery had outmaneuvered the establishment.

“That he will get many of the progressive votes is conceded,” said the Washington Standard in 1912. “But there is a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction over supporting a Socialist for the legislature.”

On November 5, 1912, William Kingery defeated Republican W. M. Blach 833 votes to 642, becoming the first socialist elected to the Washington State House of Representatives.

“Comrade Kingery”

Representative Kingery didn’t blend in in Olympia. The public noticed the sharp contrast between him and the Republicans, the Democrats, and even the Bull Moose Party progressives in the Washington State Legislature.

Early in the 1913 legislative session, the Seattle Times highlighted Kingery as “the lone Socialist member” of the House of Representatives. The newspaper Washington Socialist dubbed him “comrade Kingery,” declaring that even more socialist elected officials would be in Olympia were it not for “millions of dollars spent in this country to give corporations control of lawmaking.” The leftist press asserted that because Washington State’s working class built everything, it was entitled to everything — including increased political enfranchisement:

Walk among the palaces in Capitol Hill, Seattle. Think, every block of marble, every costly device, every luxurious contrivance is possible only through the sweat of a working man or a working woman. We have built palaces, why should we not make laws for this state?

Decades before Bernie Sanders rose to prominence with his trademark straight-talking style, William Kingery offered a politics of work over words: “There has been a lot of talk, but I can’t see what good most of it does,” said the newly sworn-in lawmaker. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer surmised that while Kingery would “vote for progressive measures which he thinks will help the state,” he considered many of them “more or less futile efforts to correct a system which needs changing.”

Not every leftist agreed with Kingery’s theory of change; negotiating left-wing fault lines took up no small amount of his bandwidth in office. Washington State’s factional stew of radical organizations simmered, for instance, when the freshman legislator supported a progressive for speaker of the Washington State House of Representatives. “They contended that I should have nominated myself, being the only socialist,” complained Kingery. Critics on the Left soon labeled him a “yellow” socialist who would sooner cut deals with Democrats than stay an isolated lefty appendix in Washington’s legislative body. In his 1979 tome Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washington, historian Carlos A. Schwantes questioned Kingery’s sense of urgency, saying he “ran on a platform that was little more than a promise to ‘play peacefully the game of politics until a majority of voters are ready to swat capitalism.’”

Historians have dubbed Kingery’s day — the years spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the “Progressive Era.” The Washington State representative was elected at a time when a wave of reformist energy aimed to curb the worst excesses of the capitalist economic system. At this time, socialists stood largely alone — even apart from most progressives — in believing that poverty and labor exploitation were inherent to capitalism and could not be reformed away.

Washington State leftists were split on how to move forward. Some poured their energy into piecemeal reforms through electoral politics, while others preferred expressly revolutionary activity via militant worker associations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Still another division existed between “reds” who frowned on socialists collaborating with Democrats and “yellows” like Representative Kingery who believed in legislative coalitions to reach leftist aims. Socialist infighting notwithstanding, it was in any case clear that two decades of mere progressive politics hadn’t done enough to reduce human suffering under capitalism.

Representative Kingery believed there was one way forward for socialists: leftist policy.  “Washington is rotten ripe for constructive socialism,” he said in 1913.

From 1913 to 1914, Kingery’s ambitious menu of legislative priorities included an eight-hour workday reform, a bill that would permit workers to sue for stolen wages, a measure to fund public schools by abolishing the Washington State National Guard and liquidating its assets, and a proposal to reduce cost-of-living expenses for Washingtonians by making the state a distributor of groceries and medicine. Kingery cosponsored infrastructure projects in other districts, building up his political capital with members of other parties. By September 1913, he had amassed enough clout to lead the impeachment of a corrupt Mason County judge who railed against socialists from the court bench.

As of early 1914, the Socialist Party of America had nineteen state legislators in nine states. The fledgling party of lefty legislators took notice of Kingery’s scrappy efforts. A profile of Washington’s first elected socialist was included in a 25 cent bulletin printed at the Socialist Party offices in Chicago and distributed nationally. “I felt that if I could gain a respectful hearing for the Socialist Party in its initial official acts, I would pave the way for constructive legislative work in the future,” he explained in the report.

Heavy Lies Kingery’s Crown

After the first year of his two-year term, Representative Kingery spent most of his energy in 1914 pursuing a universal eight-hour workday in Washington State. For all the squabbling among Washington socialists about his supposed “yellow” streak, Kingery’s workday proposal was actually more ambitious than the demand of the IWW, which first organized strikes for a nine-hour workday among timber workers in Oregon in 1907. A state labor leader described Kingery’s championing of the eight-hour workday as “the industrial salvation of sawmill workers.”

Though Washington State lawmakers had ratified a nominal eight-hour law in 1903, timber corporations like Weyerhauser and the Patrick Lumber Company still subjected loggers to cruel hours. As of 1910, two-thirds of all Washington workers were in the timber industry. Consequently, Kingery’s challenge of unfair workplace practices in Washington’s forests amounted to a huge challenge to capital in the Pacific Northwest. Representative Kingery’s 31st Legislative District was an epicenter of this battle, as the fulsome Olympic National Forest occupied large swaths of Mason County.

After Kingery’s eight-hour workday bill failed in the 1914 legislative session, he pivoted to a more grassroots-oriented approach, launching a statewide initiative campaign for it. Parallel to his reelection bid in 1914, Kingery poured himself into Initiative 13, securing endorsements from waitresses, shingle weavers, and other workers. He stumped for it in all four corners of Washington State. Kingery’s coalition included a fleet of dedicated volunteers who secured 75,000 signatures to get the initiative to appear on the ballot.

Because Washington State maintains a part-time legislature with part-time pay, Kingery was juggling these initiative campaign responsibilities with his day job as a logger and his reelection campaign, to say nothing of his family life. Area businessmen and their proxies fiercely attacked the spread-thin Kingery. In a March 1914 tirade, the Seattle Times warned that “a blanket eight-hour law [would] stimulate the fatal habit of watching the clock” among employees. Washington Socialist pushed back against the pro-business propaganda, writing that the Ford Company’s recent adoption of an eight-hour law had actually increased productive efficiency by nearly half.

Despite the best efforts of Washington State’s left, big business won the debate decisively. On November 4, 1914, the eight-hour initiative failed by a 65–35 percent margin. The defeat of Initiative 13 mirrored the demise of Representative Kingery’s short but eventful career as a lawmaker: also on November 4, he lost his reelection to Republican timber executive Mark Reed.

“The only Socialist in the House is succeeded by Mark Reed, a pioneer banker,” eulogized the Seattle Times on November 8, 1914.

The last article about Kingery to appear in the pro-capitalist Times reveals he was elected to a leadership position in his loggers’ union a week after losing his bid for reelection. Comrade Kingery never sought public office again.

Long Live Kingery

A one-term representative and the last socialist in Olympia for over a century, William H. Kingery left a lasting mark on Washington State.

Representative Mark Reed — who served sixteen years in the Washington House of Representatives and founded a company that became one of the largest private landholders in the United States — passed Kingery’s eight-hour workday bill into law after defeating him in 1914.

Shortly after he exited public life, a morbid event at the Washington State Capitol revealed Kingery’s legislative focus on worker rights to be a more temperate route than the alternative route of political violence: angered by Washington State’s paltry workplace compensation payout after he suffered an injury on the job, a Mason County logger from Kingery’s 31st Legislative District traveled to Olympia, brandished a gun, and assassinated Washington’s industrial insurance commissioner in his office in revenge in February 1917. The frustration of Kingery’s agenda may have hastened the arrival of less moderate political tactics.

One hundred ten years before I was elected in November 2024 as the second socialist to serve in the Washington State Legislature, Representative Kingery understood that an elected leftist ought to use their office to bolster people’s movements outside the halls of power as well as to win. Kingery’s pursuit of policy wins that would make a real difference refutes hackneyed portrayals of socialism as a pie-in-the-sky ideology; his cornerstone proposal of a fair workday was implemented by his Republican successor. When the Left fights, it wins — even when it doesn’t.

For leftists in electoral politics, the threat of burnout or resignation was as real in Kingery’s day as it is in ours. That the socialist representative fought so hard for everyday people only to leave office after one term is a cautionary lesson about the resilience required to navigate a system never intended to work for working people. Nevertheless, the story of Washington’s first socialist representative survives as an example of what’s possible when politicians make serious efforts to beat back capitalist exploitation.

With a new Democratic governor committed to a politics of austerity rife with budget rollbacks of crucial services and preservation of corporate tax breaks, Washingtonians would do well to heed the policy vision of its first socialist lawmaker — a vision that included fair wages, good working conditions, and universally available medicine and education for all.

“Socialism will win when we appeal to the masses,” Kingery told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1914. Over a century later, those words still ring true.