Everett Socialists Rally for Lawrence Strikers
Local unionists and radicals pack Liberty Hall to protest the brutal treatment of striking textile workers in the East and send a formal message to the President.
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A good crowd of socialists, unionists and sympathizers gathered in Liberty Hall Sunday afternoon to protest against the authorities and mill owners in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Muscatine, Iowa, in their brutal and inhuman methods taken to suppress the strikes of the textile and button workers. Clarence J. Folsom presided and strong speeches were made by Seattle speakers. A free-will offering amounting to fifty dollars was taken for the strikers in those cities. The gathered crowd adopted a resolution, which was ordered forwarded by night letter to the President of the United States and to the governors of Massachusetts and Iowa, condemning the clubbing and maltreatment of workers and declaring that the 'political, military, and judicial powers of our sovereign states are... used by the capitalists to defeat the workers in their struggle against oppression.'
“The strikers in Lawrence and Muscatine have again demonstrated that the politic, military and judicial powers of our sovereign states are, instead of affording the protection of law to citizens within their legal rights, used by the capitalists to defeat the workers in their struggle against oppression.”
This 1912 rally highlights the long history of Everett as a radical labor hub. Today, while the specific issues have shifted to global supply chains, the fundamental tension between corporate profit and the right to organize remains a live wire in the city's civic discourse.
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