In his new book, Red Harbor: Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest, leading Pacific Northwest labor historian Aaron Goings brings to life the fiery legacy of class conflict in Grays Harbor and illuminates the vital roles of immigrants, families, and working-class women in the labor movement. In our Q&A, learn about why the former “Lumber Capital of the World” was a focal point of the radical labor movement in the Pacific Northwest.
Goings is professor of history at South Puget Sound Community College. His books include The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest, winner of the 2021 Sally and Ken Owens Book Award from the Western History Association.
In what ways is Grays Harbor important in understanding the history of the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest?
Grays Harbor was a major center of the lumber industry, and lumber was easily Washington’s largest industry in the early twentieth century. The harbor’s lumber and maritime workers broke annual production and shipping records, cutting and shipping billions of board feet of lumber—and billions more red cedar shingles. These workers—from loggers in the woods, to workers in mills and on the docks, to sailors on the ships, and to the vast army of service workers at every point—made the harbor the lumber capital of the world.
The harbor was also an important center of both the mainstream labor movement (trade unions associated with the American Federation of Labor) and the labor-left of the socialists, Wobblies, and communists. The title of this book, Red Harbor, relates to both the radicalism of so many Grays Harbor workers and to the militant—often violent—methods of repression used by employers and their elite allies to fight workers’ movements. The Wobblies (the famed Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW) have a central place in this history as by the early 1910s, they had become the largest and most dynamic workers’ organization on the harbor. Many of the Northwest’s big lumber strikes started or centered on Grays Harbor, and both local vigilantes (usually local employers) and state troops attacked the area’s workers, working-class organizations and spaces. Although many readers will be familiar with the murders of Wobblies in Everett, Centralia, and Butte, the harbor’s radicals faced frequent acts of violence ranging from police and vigilante round-ups, deportations, beatings, arrests, and hall raids.
In Grays Harbor, the Wobblies crafted a community-based form of unionism, one responsive to the needs of the local population that was supported by long-term Grays Harborites.
Aaron Goings
The big lumber strike of 1935 launched mass industrial unionism in the Northwest woods—contemporary with similar struggles in auto, steel, rubber, mining, and marine transportation—and it was the harbor’s workers who launched the newspaper for the largest union group on the Pacific Coast, the Timber Worker. Throughout this history, working-class radicals played crucial roles in initiating and leading some of the Northwest’s most consequential unions and labor conflicts.
The Industrial Workers of the World reside at the center of Red Harbor. What allowed the Wobblies to remain so resilient in places like Grays Harbor, and how did community solidarity help sustain it?
The Wobblies practiced (and still practice) an inclusive style of unionism different from the narrow craft unionism of most contemporaries. In the early twentieth century, the IWW’s membership was as diverse as the North American working class itself, including western lumber, maritime, agricultural, and domestic workers from varied backgrounds. On the Pacific Coast, the Wobblies’ calls for solidarity among all workers, regardless of race, flew in the face of decades of discrimination and violence against Asian Americans. This deep solidarity—the possibility of “one big union of all workers”—threatened those whose power rested in part on keeping the working-class majority divided and weak.
Employers, police, strikebreakers, spies, the military, politicians, and much of the media recognized the potential challenges of the IWW. As the Wobblies organized and struck, elites struck back through arrests, roundups, evictions, blacklists, and sundry other antilabor techniques. But from the start a big part of the anti-IWW program came from the media—what radicals often called the “kept press.” Newspaper editors who were close allies with their fellow employers created a narrative depicting Wobblies (especially in the West) as single young migratory men who traveled between towns stirring up discontent. Many employers, journalists, and scholars went a step further by portraying Wobblies as criminals and deviants, social outcasts who cared little for family, community, or stability. In this narrative, Wobblies were troublemakers just for the sake of trouble. Ironically, considering where their own money came from, business owners and right-wing politicians cast Wobblies as social leeches—half-jokingly suggesting that the “IWW” stood for “I Won’t Work.” These original early twentieth century writings—coming from the Wobblies’ enemies—have had a lasting significance on a century of writings on the “one big union.”
To be clear, there always were itinerant Wobblies on the Pacific Coast and beyond. Millions of people migrated between work as sailors, loggers, farmworkers, roadbuilders, and countless other jobs in the early twentieth century; the IWW, like any organization representing working people of that era, had migratory members and professional organizers. But in Grays Harbor, the Wobblies crafted a community-based form of unionism, one responsive to the needs of the local population that was supported by long-term Grays Harborites. In fact, in the 1910s and 1920s the Grays Harbor IWW was largely a family-based movement, and the Wobblies’ families, like their communities, provided support for the movement. They forged ties with the wider community, built and maintained union halls, and for years had a busy social calendar filled with music, theater, sports, schooling, picnics, and funerals, while their fundraisers generated thousands of dollars annually for their varied causes—which after 1917 largely involved legal fees and other relief for the many IWW political prisoners. An entire generation of working-class children grew up immersed in the IWW’s movement culture. They witnessed IWW loggers and other workers guard the movement’s members and spaces, and took part in boycotts against antilabor companies. Many young people saw the Wobbly hall as a second home and learned that any work-life improvements their families experienced came from struggle.
Your book highlights the experiences of people often missing from the historical narrative such as immigrants and working-class women. How did you approach uncovering their voices, and why was this important to your overall project?
By expanding the view of labor radicalism beyond these caricatures, we can look at actual lives and families in the urban settings where so much anticapitalist organizing took place. This entailed deep research into the backgrounds of those who lived, worked, organized, and built families in urban areas. Red Harbor ends up not focusing much on the itinerant radicals of Wobbly lore—and notoriety—but instead places a great deal of attention on working-class families, and their organizations and cultural activities. The book starts by looking at the Finnish American Wobbly Jennie Sipo, then turns to the women who organized and helped sustain labor movements in the world’s largest lumber port.
If we can learn anything from the labor struggles of Red Harbor, it’s that successful struggles “from below” forge connections between the workplace and the wider community through outreach and activities that bring people together.
Aaron Goings
I’ve worked on this book for more than twenty years—and it is a dramatically revised and expanded version of my PhD work. I used this time to dig deeper into available research materials—to do my best to make sure that I left no stone unturned. My use of Finnish-language materials is one of the biggest contributions offered by this book. With a few rare exceptions, scholars of the IWW have focused on the movement within a single country (mostly the US) and language group (English)—perhaps forgetting (as historians Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer wrote in Wobblies of the World) that the second “W” stands for “World.” Some years ago, this gaping hole from the absence of non-English sources in most studies of the Northwest’s labor-left began to eat away at me, so I set out to work.
In short, Finns were the largest group in the IWW, the Socialist Party, and some communist groups. Finnish leftists were prolific authors and publishers, and their daily (yes, daily) Wobbly and socialist (later communist) publications churned out thousands of articles on Northwest labor written by workers themselves. For anyone interested in studying the labor-left, I can guarantee you that there are troves of primary sources written on and by Finnish-speaking labor activists in many parts of the US, Canada, and beyond. But these sources haven’t figured into many Northwest historians’ research or writings.
To help close that gap, I first immersed myself in the world of Finnish North America and spent quite a bit of time in major centers of Finnish settlement. From there, I went directly to the source, moving twice to Finland, where I studied Finnish and worked with Finnish-speaking historians on translations so I could include these long-ignored materials in studies of Pacific Coast radicalism.
The other piece of this expanded narrative involved looking more carefully at the Northwest’s dominant class—employers—and the assorted elites they collaborated with in struggles against workers’ organizations. Unsurprisingly, employers and their allies were nearly all English-speaking, so that research went a lot faster, and employers’ perspectives—from describing labor unionists as criminals to advocating violence against strikers—was often advertised in mainstream newspapers.
What do you hope readers take away from this book?
My hope is that historians of the labor-left and anyone connected to the labor movement—or even those with an interest in labor struggles—will get a little something from the book. But I also hope it inspires readers to look into the writings and history of leftist social movements—including the IWW. They had a great deal to say about the people, institutions, and structures that oppress us and formulated methods for changing the world around them.
If we can learn anything from the labor struggles of Red Harbor, it’s that successful struggles “from below” forge connections between the workplace and the wider community through outreach and activities that bring people together. Those with money and power had—and have—more access to the media, to police and legal protections, and to political support; and they use them all to keep less powerful people divided. By collaborating with those who have shared interests, by building community spaces and media, and by engaging in shared social and political activities, it’s possible to build and maintain workers’ movements even in the face of frightening repression.
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