dates the Cold War. It carries the weight of seven decades and is taken seriously. At the beginning of our century it was used against logger members of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW These “Wobblies” demanded an eighthour day, a minimum wage and other changes equally radical for the time: the union’s ultimate goal was a total restructuring of society and the abolition of the wage system. 3. Wha. was it like to be a logger in Washington before the Great Strike of 1917? A young man rides a company steam train with other bindle stiffs who tote their bed rolls from camp to camp. Their calked boots dig into the wooden floor of the flatbed car. In the foothills of the Cascades, drizzling rain dissolves any division between green fir and sky. The men are quiet. They will be marooned at the lumber camp for months. The young man calculates his poor wages and how long it will take to recoup the money he paid to the job shark to get this job. Work days often stretch to twelve hours, sometimes longer. At night, the sounds of men moaning and snoring on their pallets in the crowded bunkhouse displace the equally lonely sounds of owls and coyotes. Noise, stench, aching muscles and stiff joints do not keep him from dropping each night into a state of sleep akin to unconsciousness. The young man wears water-proofed clothing called tin pants, but with the rain, the sweat and the sodden underbrush, he never feels dry. He suffers from dysentery. And worries about becoming careless in his fatigue. He has seen a man fall a hundred and fifty feet from a spar tree. He helped to carry the body to the railroad track for the train to pick up. Injured men must take the same train, on its schedule, to town for help. In a few years the young logger fighting at the front in France will reflect that the camaraderie of the trenches is no greater nor the physical conditions more miserable than in the lumber camps. When the loggers talk, they complain of the bad food, the same plate of beans day after day, of each other’s quirks with which they live so intimately in the cramped bunkhouse. They chew snoose and reminisce about rare nights on the town along the skidroads of Portland or Aberdeen, and they swap tales of loggers legendary for being the loudest bullwhacker, the fastest faller or the most flamboyant high rigger. But mostly the loggers talk of the work: the fearlessness required for topping a spar tree, the nimble alertness necessary in setting and releasing chokers and the mechanical ingenuity required to keep a steam donkey running. They also rehash the many accidents they have seen and their own close calls and injuries. More and more frequently they discuss the “One Big Union,” the IWW. They speak of the men killed and wounded in Everett, Washington in 1916. Of a big strike in the making. Of men run out of town (“deportation"), arrested, tarred and feathered, beaten and lynched (“suicide”). The young man considers becoming a Wobbly. At times the danger fright- * ens him. Other times he feels he has nothing to lose. 4. T"he Centralia of my memory is the town of my childhood in the ‘60s, when suburban sprawl is just beginning and shopping malls are still a big city novelty. There is a new freeway, but it is not yet connected to town by a mile-long strip of franchise fast food restaurants. Centralia is quite self-contained. When we travel to nearby Chehalis, we pass by fields which are flooded in fall and winter. In the center of Centralia on Main Street, a Carnegie library and city park occupy an entire block. The park, filled with huge, leafy shade trees, is usually empty, like a front parlor opened only for company and special occasions. A block east from the park, Main Street intersects Tower Avenue, which parallels the railroad tracks and is the principal commercial street. Here the prosperous downtown consists of two and three story brick buildings, solid and respectable. Passers-through comment on the town’s prettiness, and on the courtesy of the people. New residents notice that they are treated more coolly and kept at a distance. As Tower Avenue continues northward to dead end at the Skookumchuck River, the buildings become shabby. The two blocks from First to Third, however, are more than shabby—these strangely vacant blocks exist in a limbo. Despite the small grocery store which sells cigarettes and beer, these two blocks look and feel deserted. Visiting here is like entering an old lava field, an old silence. In another Centralia, in Pennsylvania, there is also a section of town where no one ventures. A fire has been burning underground in the coal mine there since 1962. Despite the fire and closure of the mine, many residents have stayed on. Life appears calm and peaceful—except where the pavement is hot enough to cook on, where poisonous smoke rises through manholes and the ground may collapse at any moment. 5. D uring the IWW strike of 1917, while WWI rages in Europe, hundreds of Wobblies are jailed, workers are beaten and union halls looted here at home. The public is encouraged to think of the strikers as traitors for interfering with the war effort. The Wobblies do not win the confrontation, but they do gain concessions: mattresses for the bunks in the logging camps and the eight-hour day. The end of the strike does not bring an end to the arrests, beatings, deportations and lynchings. In the spring of 1918 in Centralia, the union secretary, Britt Smith, is kidnapped and taken to the woods where he is forced to run the gauntlet—two rows of citizens who beat him with sticks and other weapons before he is threatened with lynching and finally deported. Soon after, during a Red Cross parade, the IWW Hall is raided by the paraders, who auction off or destroy all its contents in the street and beat the occupants, rubbing the loggers’ necks raw with nooses as they threaten them with lynching. They are then jailed or deported. Blind Tom Lassiter sells IWW and other radical publications in his small newsstand on Tower Avenue. At three one afternoon, a policeman looks on and warns passersby not to interfere as assailants push the blind man into a car and deport him over the county line where they dump him in a ditch. 6. T"he founder of Centralia was a black settler named George Washington. The illegitimate child of a black slave and a free white Englishwoman, Washington was raised from birth by white friends of his mother. They moved from Virginia to Missouri, where Washington became a free citizen but found his business enterprises encumbered by law because of his color. He headed further west. In 1852, Washington staked a squatter’s claim where the Chehalis and Skookumchuck Rivers join. He founded the town of Centerville 23 years later. Washington laid out the town, straight and square with broad streets, and donated land, money and labor for a church, a cemetery, a school and the city park which bears his name. His vision, hard work and kindness saw the town and its early citizens through many hard times, including several depressions. 7. Cjeorge Washington Park, in addition to its large deciduous trees and stately, ivy covered library, contains a fish pond, a wading pool, a bandstand, a swing, an aluminum slide painted as Dumbo, and in the center a statue of a WWI doughboy, grim in his trenchcoat, helmet and rifle. My friend Sara and I walk the many blocks to the library in summer and arrive at the park hot and tired. After checking out an armful of books in the basement children’s library, we go upstairs and trespass through the hushed adult section to leave by the front door. When we escape the building we giggle and talk. Before us in the empty park stands the WWI soldier. We strain our necks to read the inscription on the statue, but it is very patriotic and very boring. I start to read it many times, but never once finish. On the way home we always stop at 24 Flavors for chocolate ice cream cones. 8. In 1919, the IWW has opened its second hall in Centralia. The end of the war has not brought an end to fervid Americanism and accusations of treason. In the weeks before the Armistice Day parade that year, the papers preach the threat of the “red menace.” Speakers elaborate on the dangers facing Americanism from the sinister, well-organized Bolsheviks. Business organizations hold public forums to discuss the Wobbly problem, and then secret meetings. They defend the secrecy as being necessary to combat a radical, subversive organization. The IWW, hearing of plans to attack their hall during the upcoming parade, circulates a leaflet: TO THE CITIZENS OF CENTRALIA WE MUST APPEAL T o the law abiding citizens of Centralia and to the working class in general: We beg of you to read and carefully consider the following: The profiteering class of Centralia have of late been waving the flag of our country in an endeavor to incite the lawless element of our city to raid our hall and club us out of town...covertly inviting returned servicemen to do their bidding.... They say we are a menace; and we are a menace to all mobocrats and pilfering thieves. These patriotic profiteers throughout the country have falsely and without any founda- tion whatever charged the IWW with every crime on the statute books. The only convictions of the IWW were those under the espionage law, where we were forced to trial before jurors, all of whom were at political and industrial enmity toward us. This same class of handpicked courts and juries also convicted many labor leaders, socialists, nonpartisans, pacifists, guilty of no crime save that of loyalty to the working class. Only last month, 25 IWW were indicted in Seattle as strike leaders, belonging to an unlawful organization attempting to overthrow the government and other vile things under the syndicalist law passed by the last legislature. The court held them a lawful organization, and their literature was not disloyal nor inciting to violence, though the government had combed the country from Chicago to Seattle for witnesses, and used every pamphlet taken from their hall in government raids. They chew snoose and reminisce about rare nights on the town along the s/^idroads of Portland or Aberdeen, and they swap tales of loggers legendary for being the loudest bulbwhacker, the fastest faller or the most flam' ' boyant high rigger. Many IWW in and around Centralia went to France and fought and bled for the democracy they never secured. They came home to be threatened with mob violence by the law and order outfit that pilfered every nickel possible from their mothers and fathers while they were fighting in the trenches in the thickest of the fray. Our only crime is solidarity, loyalty to the working class and justice to the oppressed. 9. mother and her eleven-year-old daughter, new to town, visit the library. They ask about the statue in the park. The librarian looks at them strangely and from under the counter brusquely takes out a pamphlet printed by the American Legion. The pamphlet explains that on November 11, 1919, a parade to commemorate the first anniversary of the Armistice marched north on Tower Avenue from the city park. The marchers, mostly men in World War I uniforms, were to continue to Third Street, make a u-turn and retrace the same route south again. In these last two blocks before the parade turned around were several two story wooden hotels where loggers rented cheap rooms when they weren’t working in the woods. The IWW Hall occupied a commercial space on the ground floor of the largest hotel, the Roderick. The parade reached Third Street and in changing direction the spacing between the various contingents became irregular. The men marked time, straightening their ranks when a shot came from the IWW Hall. Some of the men ran for cover, but others ran towards the IWW Hall. More shots came from the hall, from Seminary Hill beyond the railroad tracks and from the upper windows of the hotels. Three men were killed and three wounded. This is the “official”version of the Centralia Massacre. 10. T'he day of the 1919 Armistice Day parade a group of boys make sure they find a good spot across from the union hall because they have heard there is to be a lynching. Later, some witnesses agree with the testimony of the paraders that no one was armed. Others say that some of the marchers were indeed armed, some were carrying lynch ropes, and that the paraders rallied to a cry of “Let's get ‘em boys,” storming the Wobbly hall before any shots were fired. One man in the parade declares that the storming of the hall and the shots were as simultaneous as any two acts could be. One of the loggers inside the IWW Hall is Wesley Everest, also a veteran wearing the uniform of his country. He and paraders exchange shots as they chase him through alleys to the banks of the Skookumchuck River. Everest starts to cross the river, but it is too swift and deep, so he faces his pursuers on the bank of the swollen river and warns them not to come closer. Before they take him, with his last bullet Everest shoots and kills Dale Hubbard—the up-and-coming nephew of a lumber baron. Wesley Everest is beaten and dragged back to town where a rope is tossed over a lamp post for a public lynching. Then a woman, the ^nadam of Centralia’s leading brothel, calls to individuals of the mob by name. She shames them, threatens them, and the power of the mob frays and breaks. Everest is deposited at the jail, unconscious. 11. In Centralia the “other side of the tracks” is called “across the viaduct.” I went to Edison Elementary School in the eminently Republican neighborhood of town. It was a large brick building with hardwood floors, well maintained and spacious. The library was a large room presided over by an efficient little woman with a squeaky, whispering voice. Logan School across the viaduct was a neglected old wooden structure, a fire hazard, and the library was in a closet. The neighborhood around Logan School was not manicured. The kids there had the reputation of being bad students, tough and often in trouble with the police. 12. T^ifter the deaths on November 11, 1919, violence rules. The authorities close off the roads into town. They censor the mail as well as telegrams. Posses terrorize the region. They break into houses, insulting, threatening and striking women and children. Men are bludgeoned. The posses roaming the countryside are so excitable they shoot and kill one of their own members. Two of the men being searched for are never apprehended, but many say they were caught and just never heard of again. Rumors circulate that people have been burned alive in mill sawdust burners. Many union members and sympathizers are arrested, including the IWW attorney (charged as an accessory). In the first few days after the “massacre,” over a thousand men are arrested throughout ■ the state. In Centralia, some are released, eleven eventually stand trial. 13. o a small child, our next door neigh1 bor, Fritz, is wonderful though a bit scary. Clinton St. Quarterly-
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