History of IWW in NW Washington

IWW union organizing began in northwestern Washington by 1906. The region’s first Local (today IWW uses the term ‘Branch’) was chartered with 108 sawmill workers in Anacortes in June 1906, less than one year after the IWW was founded in Chicago. One month later, a ‘mixed local’ consisting of workers in a variety of industries was chartered in Bellingham. The Lynden local was chartered that September. We know IWW was organizing all around northwest Washington in the lumber and construction industries, including at the Bloedel-Donovan Lumber Mill.  A new  Lumber Workers Industrial Union Local, #337, was chartered in Bellingham in 1909.

IWW in Bellingham opposed the AFL-driven expulsion of the Sikh cannery workers in 1906.  A free speech protest was organized in Bellingham in 1908; we will have to tell you about that some day. Four Bellingham IWWs were tried in the first Criminal Syndicalism trial in Washington State in December 1919. Read the story on our page here. The IWW Construction Workers union employed at Stone and Webster’s Baker River Dam at Concrete WA struck in 1923 using innovative tactics, bolstering their total shutdown by putting organizers on the train bringing strike breakers hired in Minneapolis to sign them up into the union- the new members marched to the job site wearing IWW buttons and singing Wob songs. We will have to tell that story on a future page.

We will update this history as we have time and information. Historic IWW records from the Bellingham offices that were held at IWW General Headquarters in Chicago were stolen or destroyed by the nationwide FBI raids on IWW halls on September 5, 1917. Local records were seized during the 1919 raid on the Local 337 hall that resulted in the criminal syndicalism trial that year. We never got them back.

For more on the 1917 nation-wide raids, see ‘Trial of the Century’ below.

The Bellingham Herald was rabidly anti-IWW and fear-mongering articles like the one below were not unusual. Maybe we need another page that highlights the Herald’s paranoia.

Some websites:

University of Washington IWW history project

April 1918: Trial of the Century

From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, we have this passage to share with you:

“In early September 1917, Department of Justice agents made simultaneous raids on forty-eight IWW meeting halls across the country… 165 IWW leaders were arrested for conspiring to hinder the draft, encourage desertion… One hundred and one went on trial in April 1918; it lasted five months, the longest criminal trial in American history up to that time… One IWW man told the court:

‘You ask me why the I.W.W. is not patriotic to the United States. If you were a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went west for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept you long enough in a place to qualify  to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if the deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they had you down; if there was one law for Ford, Suhr, and Mooney, and another for Harry Thaw; if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic? This war is a business man’s war and we don’t see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs that we now enjoy.’

The jury found them all guilty. [Big Bill] Haywood jumped bail and fled to Russia, where he remained until his death ten years later.” (pgs. 372-373)