The Great Seattle Boycott of 1885
When local liquor interests tried to starve a newspaper into silence for its stance on Sunday closing laws, the community launched a fierce retaliatory boycott of its own.
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.
On January 25, 1885, a movement emerged in Seattle led by the North Seattle W.C.T.U. and other civic groups. In response to a organized campaign by liquor dealers and their associates to ruin the Post-Intelligencer—a paper that had dared to support municipal Sunday-closing laws—the community fought back with a ‘boycott of the boycotters.’ The local liquor interest, feeling the pressure of the law, had attempted to suppress the paper by stripping it of advertisements and patronage. In response, a rally of citizens declared it the duty of all law-abiding people to refuse to trade with any business man who aided the liquor interests in their design. The public, through the W.C.T.U., pledged to withhold their patronage from those who sought to ‘gag the press and override law,’ while simultaneously funneling their support to merchants who stood for ‘good government.’ As the Post-Intelligencer noted, while they deplored the necessity of such warfare, it became an imperative duty to stand for the principle that ‘principle is paramount to money.’
“Shall we disappoint them? We very much deplore having to use such methods of warfare, but the necessity is forced upon us, and it has now become the imperative duty of all law and order citizens to boycott those 'boycotters.'”
The 1885 standoff over the Post-Intelligencer highlights the enduring tension between organized economic interests and the local press. Just as Seattle’s current media landscape faces intense scrutiny over corporate influence and civic accountability, this nineteenth-century struggle shows that the weaponization of patronage—and the subsequent consumer backlash—has long been a hallmark of local political combat.
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