The I.W.W. Prisoner Scandal at Fort George Wright
A military commander is suspended after local officials bypassed the chain of command to house Industrial Workers of the World prisoners at a Spokane fort.
SPOKANE — As a result of an alleged hitch in War Department ethics whereby the officials of this state failed to take into consideration Brigadier-General M. A. Maus, commander of the Department of the Columbia, and appealed directly to the War Department at Washington, D. C., for permission temporarily to house I.W.W. prisoners in the jail at Fort George Wright, Lieutenant Colonel W. H. Abercrombie has been suspended from the command at the fort. Colonel Abercrombie has asked for a four months' leave of absence, and at the end of that time will ask for retirement. According to military ethics, it is said, General Maus should have been consulted. But these ethics, it is affirmed, were not known or not thought of by Mayor N. S. Pratt when the I.W.W. affair was at its height and probably not known or thought of by I. M. Howell, Secretary of State, who was acting Governor at that time and who carried on the telegraphic correspondence with the authorities in Washington relating to housing the I.W.W. prisoners.
“But these ethics, it is affirmed, were not known or not thought of by Mayor N. S. Pratt when the I.W.W. affair was at its height.”
This story captures the intense friction between local civic leaders and federal military authorities during the height of the I.W.W. labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest. The tension over who controls detention facilities and the legal status of labor activists remains a recurring theme in Washington's history of labor-state relations.
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