The Chain Gang Strike: When Seattle’s Jailers Fed Rebels Bread and Water
Twelve roughs on the city's Commercial Street cleanup crew walked off the job, leaving six loyal workers to finish the job. The police response? Lock them in the darkest cells until their sentences expire.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The chain gang sent out on a strike yesterday, or at least two-thirds of it did. The gang numbered eighteen and the toughs, drunkards and vagabonds who compose it were cleaning up Commercial street, near Jackson, when twelve of them threw down their scrapers about 1 o'clock and declined to work for the city any longer.
Officer Terry, who had charge of the gang, had very little to say to them, but bunched them together in the middle of the street and allowed them to watch the faithful six who refused to join the strikers and quietly continued operations on the street. The twelve men who struck are mostly roughs of the very worst description, and who as Officer Terry said, 'would kill a man for a quarter.' The six all belong to Seattle, and are men who are ordinarily hard workers, but who unfortunately are addicted to drink.
Their faithfulness will undoubtedly be rewarded by a commutation of a good part of their sentences. The dozen strikers were last night placed in the darkest cells of the city jail, and they will be fed on bread and water until their sentences expire, or their stubbornness gives way.
It may be stated that the police have no power to make the men return to work by the use of force.
This 1903 account of penal labor striking against working conditions offers a grim mirror to modern debates over prison labor, incarceration rates, and the treatment of the indigent. The image of 'toughs, drunkards and vagabonds' being used as municipal labor highlights how the city once outsourced its sanitation needs to its own jail population, blurring the lines between punishment and public service.
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