The Centennial of the IWW’s electrifying free speech campaign in Spokane is at hand. How today’s activists brought the historic conflict back to life.
By Tim Connor
Tuesday, at noon, a colorful brass band (nicknamed the “P-Jammers”) played in the angled sunshine along Spokane Falls Boulevard. Across the street, a picket line on the west side of Stevens Street spelled out “LABOR CREATES ALL WEALTH” beneath a golden lamp pole banner promoting The Lion King. With those introductions and after a succession of planned and unplanned guest speakers had said what they’d come to say, Liz Moore 
retrieved a blue and white bullhorn and explained what all the street theater had been about.
“If the IWW hadn’t taken up the fight for free speech a hundred years ago,” she said, “we might be having to take up the same fight today. We win when we struggle, we build strength when we struggle. So we wanted to do this to celebrate and honor our political ancestors who broke this ground for us, but also to highlight that not only is there this wonderful story that very few people know about, this poorly known Spokane progressive history, but also this not-as-well-known-as-it-should-be progressive presence here in Spokane.”
The IWW is the International Workers of the World, or the “Wobblies,” as they became known. It is a radically socialist organization that was born from the organizing struggles of the Western Federation of Miners at an “industrial congress” in Chicago in 1905. The Wobblies arrived to organize thousands of unemployed miners and other workers in Spokane three years later. They were never indoctrinated into the “Spokane nice,” world of corporate conformity and one of their mottos, “Socialism with its working clothes on,” 
reflected that.
It is likely for that reason that their presence in Spokane, and the remarkable Constitutional challenge they confronted city leaders with a century ago, is all but completely missing from Spokane history books. Given the unabashed, anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Wobblies, perhaps the story is just too gritty to tell or be taught in such an outwardly nice place like this. Still, it’s a helluva story. It includes one of the most defiant and successful acts of civil disobedience in American history, one to which most people in Spokane are completely oblivious.
And that was Liz Moore’s point with the bull horn. She was mostly being Liz Moore, modern day organizer for the Peace & Justice Action League of Spokane (PJALS), but she was also, in character as Lucy Parsons, an early 20th century IWW organizer and the widow of Albert Parsons, an anarchist executed for his role in the bloody Chicago Haymarket riot of 1886.
Dressed as Lucy Parsons, she introduced Lisa Stocker, who was in costume as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the 19-year-old orator and organizer who was immortalized in Joe Hill’s song, “The Rebel Girl.” Stocker read from Gurley Flynn’s December, 1909 article, “The Free Speech Fight at Spokane,” that became a cover story in the International Socialist Review.
It began: “The working class of Spokane are engaged in a terrific conflict, one of the most vital of the local class struggles. It is a fight for more than free speech. It is to prevent the free press and labor’s right to organize from being throttled. The writers of the associated
press newspapers have lied about us systematically and unscrupulously. It is only through the medium of the Socialist and labor press that we can hope to reach the ear of the public. The struggle was precipitated by the I.W.W. and it is still doing the active fighting, namely, going to jail.”
The prison battle between the Wobblies and Spokane came about this way:
Because of the hostility of organizing in the workplace, the IWW’s preferred method of organizing in Spokane was street meetings. The city responded by banning street meetings, but amended the law in 1909 to make exceptions for the Salvation Army and other religious organizations. That was a bit much. The IWW regarded the Salvation Army as its staunch opponent in organizing (another Joe Hill song mocked the Salvation Army for preaching mortal acceptance of miserable working and living conditions because “you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”) It was then the IWW leadership focused its attention on Spokane and the IWW newspaper, The Industrial Worker, ran a story under the headline “Wanted-Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane.”
And they did. On November 2, 1909 alone, more than a hundred were arrested as they stepped up to a soap box and tried to speak at what is now Stevens Street and Spokane Falls Boulevard, the site of Tuesday’s rally. Before the four month action was over, according to BBC research, 1,200 people had been jailed under miserable conditions amid widespread charges of mistreatment. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is reported to have chained herself to a lamp post in an unsuccessful tactic to avoid being taken away. It didn’t work. She later 
accused the Sheriff of Spokane of using the women’s section of the jail as a brothel, with proceeds going to the police department. According to IWW organizer John Panzer, the Spokane Women’s Club was so outraged at Gurley Flynn’s arrest that they raised $5,000 for her bail. She was never brought to trial.
The major complaint of Spokane workers was that local employment agencies were essentially running a scam: charging workers a dollar to find them jobs that would quickly result in their being laid off, and thus back in the employment lines to be charged again to find work.
In March of 1910, the city gave in under the weight of the costs of arresting, trying and jailing so many speakers. It not only released all free speech prisoners, but agreed to revoke the licenses of 19 local employment agencies involved in the scam.
Tuesday’s recreation of this amazing civic siege mixed history with current events and dollops of humor. Veteran local activist Michael Poulin led a small band of Gilded Age cops who, like clockwork, interrupted every speaker and playfully hauled each of them off amid a din of whistles, drums, horns, and jeers.
“Let him go pig!” a man shouted at Poulin during one of the “arrests.”
“I’ll show you a case of swine flu!” Poulin snapped back, to a roar of laughter.
Joggers running through the park gawked, motorists honked.
In this ceremony there were at least three very discernible, century-old threads. One was in the person of Rick Bocook, perhaps better known as “Harpman Hatter.” Bocook, a harmonica player, is a steadfast Spokane street musician who helped galvanize opposition to a package of free speech limiting ordinances brought to the Spokane City Council last year by business groups concerned about street musicians and aggressive panhandlers. Bocook, who frequently works with Center for Justice lawyers monitoring speech in Spokane, largely succeeded last year in getting the council to drop some of the more onerous provisions of the proposed code changes.
Bocook was introduced by fellow street musician Greg Youmans, a union musician who’s better known as a double bass player with the Spokane Symphony.
“The ability to play a musical instrument and sing in public and solicit funds are forms of expression protected by the First Amendment,” Bocook said. Since last year’s airing of these issues, he reported, he’s had fewer problems with city police but more from private security guards on downtown streets trying to remove him and other musicians from storefront sidewalks.
“Security will still come up to you and tell you you’re trespassing,” Bocook said. “And then you’re going to have to take a chance on still being arrested for disorderly conduct.”
Another link to the past was a modern day Wobbly, Spokane teamster and IWW member Tim Hill, who spoke last.
“I want everyone to know you can bring democracy to the workplace by joining a union,” Hill said. “Also, if you have a chance, check out IWW.org. There are Wobblies in places we have no idea. There are Wobblies riding trains as we speak, whether it’s from the east coast to the west coast, or wherever. Also, the IWW will organize anybody, even if you’re a Taco Bell worker.”
As expected, Bocook and Hill were both whistled down and playfully carried away by Poulin’s band of faux police after a couple minutes.
But the other amazing thread to this event came days before the sign wavers, musicians and free speakers showed up. It was a remarkably candid feature story in the Spokesman-Review by veteran columnist and author Jim Kershner, entitled “A fight for free speech.”
Kershner’s article not only hailed the anniversary as marking “the nation’s first significant free speech battle,” but bluntly acknowledged one of the Wobblies’ chief complaints–that the Cowles-owned Spokane newspapers, including the one his column now appears in, “were uniformly unsympathetic towards the Wobblies and their cause.”
“The Spokesman-Review called the anti-street-speaking ordinance ‘reasonable and necessary,’” Kershner wrote, “It said the Wobblies could hold all of the meetings they want outside the ‘fire limits’ or on vacant lots or in halls, but they did not have the right to ‘obstruct business streets and sidewalks’ and ‘force their doctrines’ upon the unwilling ears of the citizens of Spokane.”
Kershner’s article elicited what is arguably the most candidly revealing statement about
Spokane’s cloistered character that has appeared lately.
It was from a writer who simply listed herself as “soccermomsusie” in posting a comment on the newspaper’s website.
“I miss the good old days when we called ‘em reds and commies. It was good to see the Spokesman Review leading the charge back in the day!
Now the paper has to tell all sides of a story, well not all the time. If another side of a story gets in the way of how they are trying to make people feel, they can leave it out. That is a good thing because it doesn’t confuse people!
I can’t believe they let Jim Kershner tell people about this! Hopefully they bury this thing. Do not confuse people. Take a stand, Spokesman Review! Keep that stand, even if for over a hundred years or more, even if the “facts” dictate otherwise. If you don’t, people will be confused.
HEAR OUR VOICE!!
The wobblies were reds and commies then, they still are today. The Spokesman Review was right then, it still is today. Recipe for success. Don’t get soft on us now!”
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