Freepost: How America’s “Fighting Mayor” stopped the 1919 Seattle General Strike

Communist-backed unions shut down major city for the first time in US history

This article is a part of an ongoing series on the First Red Scare. The last two entries in this series were a recounting of a forgotten anarchist bombing campaign that paralyzed New York City in 1915 and a reproduction of several intelligence reports from the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia during the Russian Civil War (1917-1921). Please become a paid subscriber to support my work, it really does make a difference in my life.

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Ole Hanson (January 6, 1874 – July 6, 1940) was the sort of man who made this country great. Ole’s parents were Norwegians who immigrated to the United States to take advantage of the Homestead Act, which gave free government land to American citizens or prospective citizens in the hopes of settling the enormous frontier. He was born in a log cabin in Wisconsin. The family had very little to their name except 6 healthy children. Ole was their first child born in the United States.

Ole was a child prodigy. By 13, he was teaching at the local schoolhouse. He worked nights at a tailor’s shop so he could spend his days studying law. He passed the Bar exam at 19, two years before he would even be eligible to practice law. In 1902, he and his family were seriously injured in a train derailment in Texas. Two of his daughters were killed and doctors concluded that Ole would never be able to walk again.

Ole, however, refused to accept this. His idol was Theodore Roosevelt, then President. As a child, Roosevelt had been diagnosed with asthma and a number of other physical ailments. Doctors claimed that even slight stress could kill him. Roosevelt ignored their advice and set about a regime of strenuous exercise. By the end, his illnesses had disappeared and Roosevelt was a giant of a man.

Ole knew the story and followed Roosevelt’s lead. He constructed an elaborate sling and harness system that would allow him to walk unassisted. He then walked with his family alongside a covered wagon containing all their possessions to Seattle. His supposedly permanent disabilities disappeared as he undertook the long journey, at first in immense pain. It’s reported that when Hanson first saw the lights of Seattle while approaching the city at night, he declared that he would be mayor one day.

After bouncing between several different jobs and then pursuing a long and successful political career, he eventually was elected mayor in 1918. Following the example of Roosevelt and other Progressive Republicans, he ran on a platform of improving working conditions, especially for people in industrial settings. He didn’t get to enjoy his position in peace for long.

The end of WWI was followed by enormous labor unrest in the United States as returning troops reentered a very crowded labor market. The successful Russian Revolution had accelerated union organizing to a fever pitch. In 1919, unionized dockworkers, influenced by the communists, refused to load ships bound for areas of Russia still controlled by the anti-communist White Army. The arrival of a mysterious Russian vessel, supposedly containing money and Bolshevik agents, was followed by thousands of pamphlets praising revolutionary activity throughout the city.

This agitation was accompanied by a wave of real-world violence. On January 13, leftists staged huge demonstrations blocking all traffic on a major road (against city ordinance) and attacked police who tried to move them off the street. A police captain was swarmed and almost stabbed by the mob. Most of the unknown assailants escaped arrest, disappearing into the crowd.

Marauding leftists cursed and randomly attacked uniformed soldiers and sailors they encountered. An off-duty Marine was sucker punched by a passing laborer. When the assailant was captured with the help of passersby he was revealed to be a 20-year-old Russian immigrant. The communist-controlled International Workers of the World (IWW) union immediately provided lawyers and bail money for 13 rioters who police managed to arrest. It was an organized conspiracy.

On February 6, 1919, shortly after the official World War I Armistice was signed, a massive alliance of labor unions, including the IWW, declared the first General Strike in American history in Seattle. At the time Seattle had a population of 300,000. That day 65,000 workers walked off the job. The city shut down. No work could occur. Nearly all businesses were forced to close. The city was at the mercy of the unions.

Hanson understood exactly what was going on. He loudly proclaimed that the strikers were following the lead of the Bolsheviks and immediately flooded the city with police. Not only did Hanson hire hundreds of new “special deputies” (many of whom were patriotic young men gathered from the nearby University of Washington), he travelled to local military bases and deputized thousands of soldiers (an ability that he did not technically have as mayor). The city was transformed into a fortress.

On the second day of the strike, Hanson issued this proclamation to the citizens of Seattle:

By virtue of the authority vested in me as mayor, I hereby guarantee to all the people of Seattle absolute and complete protection. They should go about their daily work and business in perfect security. We have fifteen hundred policemen, fifteen hundred regular soldiers from Camp Lewis, and can and will secure, if necessary, every soldier in the Northwest to protect life, and property. The time has come for every person in Seattle to show his Americanism. Go about your daily duties without fear. We will see to it that you have food, transportation, water, light, gas and all necessities. The anarchists in this community shall not rule its affairs. All persons violating the laws will be dealt with summarily.

The longer the strike went on, the more the public turned against the unions. Hanson was widely known as a reformer. He had campaigned on guaranteeing an 8 hour work day and fair treatment of workers. Many of the workers who had been forced by unions to go on strike had voted for Hanson in the mayoral election. It became increasingly transparent that the strike was an attempt to extract concessions at figurative gunpoint, the first of many planned confrontations.

The strikers did little to help their cause by issuing written “permissions” to the few businesses that they allowed to remain open, displayed on signs. It left a bitter taste in people’s mouths to see a sign indicating that mourners at a cemetery were only allowed to bury their loved ones thanks to the good graces of the city’s unions. There was always the implied threat that these “privileges” could be revoked one day.

Although strikes were infrequent before WWI, in 1919 there were hundreds of strikes every month. The trend showed no sign of slowing down. Normal people began to feel like they were living in a never-ending hostage situation. Things that had once been a certainty, including just the ability to work for a living, could no longer be relied upon.

Because the city became so well-defended due to Hanson’s proactiveness, the violence, sabotage, and other provocations that typically followed these strikes could not occur. There was no way for the strikers to escalate the situation or create a scandal to force an agreement. No one had any illusions that mob behavior would have been met with anything other than overwhelming legal force by Hanson and his men. The agitators might win a street fight, or at least escape arrest at one, if they outnumbered their opponents by 100-to-1. When the odds were down to 5-to-1 it became a very different story.

After five days of tense peace, the unions backed down and voted to end the strike. Normal life resumed in the city. Hanson was victorious. He had saved Seattle without a drop of blood shed.

The radicals, however, wanted revenge. Hanson was targeted in the infamous anarchist mail bombing campaign in April 1919. Although the bomb Hanson received was rendered inert by a faulty detonator, dozens of bombs were sent to prominent American anti-communists. Several people, family members or employees of the intended victims who had the misfortune to handle their mail, were killed or injured.

The anarchist bombings stopped after one of the lead bombers, an Italian anarchist publisher named Carlo Valdinoci, was killed when one of his bombs exploded prematurely. The explosion happened immediately after Valdinoci planted a large bomb outside of the Washington D.C., home of US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer was home with his family at the time. Though they were lightly injured, they were seriously shaken by the blast. After Valdinoci’s death, his widow lived with Nicola Sacco, one of the men arrested and executed in the controversial Sacco and Vanzetti case. Although the two men were presented by the media as pacifists persecuted for their peaceful political beliefs, both men supported violence and were affiliated with the Italian Anarchist terrorist network of the time.

Police began to unravel the rest of Valdinoci’s network. Although building formal criminal cases against members of the immigrant-dominated and fanatical anarchist community (one of the suspects committed suicide while he was being held for questioning) proved challenging, aggressive use of the Alien Anarchist Exclusion Act allowed these people to be permanently removed from the country without trial.

In August 1919, exhausted from the ordeal, Hanson resigned his position, declaring “I am tired out and am going fishing.”

Widely loved in Seattle, Hanson’s reputation nationally also grew substantially. He was declared America’s “Fighting Mayor” and seen as a model for how to deal with the increasingly common unrest facing America’s major cities. He embarked on a nationwide speaking tour to share his experiences.

He later wrote a book, Americanism versus Bolshevism, where he shared his story and outlined his national platform. Although the book has many insightful sections, there’s one quote from the preface that illustrates the depth of his understanding of the forces of social upheaval that had so recently destroyed the Russian Empire and left more than 10 million dead. He wrote:

…. [B]olshevism is the autocratic rule of the lowest, least intelligent, least able class who believe that by “direct action” and “force” they can terrorize our population into turning over to them the conduct, ownership, and control of everything. Strikingly ignorant, malignantly cruel, with no concept of history, with but an elementary knowledge of social production, with little productive capacity, with no constructive ability, this movement in our country would be ludicrous were it not for the sentimental, weak-minded followers who, steeped in idealism and fanaticism, really believe in a [B]olshevik Utopia, where free milk will run from the water mains and life may be supported without toil, where knowledge may gained without effort, and where the established truths of the centuries will be overthrown by soviet resolutions.

This really does sum things up very nicely.

After his national political ambitions sputtered out, Ole Hanson went on to become a real estate tycoon. He founded the city of San Clemente, CA as a visionary project to create the ultimate high quality-of-life small town. More to come about Ole Hanson soon. I hope you enjoyed this introduction to the great man and his life.

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Further reading:

The Legend of Old Hanson by Don Kindred