The Seattle Labor Movement Breaks with Anarchism
After years of tension, Seattle's working-class leadership officially severs ties with a radical faction that openly celebrated the Chicago Haymarket-era bombings.
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.
There is a rupture in Seattle. Here, a little clique of demagogues and agitators set themselves up as the only true friends of labor. For a time, the case which they presented seemed plausible enough in carrying public opinion with them. Finally, they made their bold move and asserted their true opinions. A paper with which they were all associated—a paper which has been regarded as their mouthpiece and which had been made the official organ of the powerful society of which these agitators had apparently gained control—was indecorous enough to reveal to the public, instead of the platitudes of organized labor, the hideous visage of anarchism. That paper, in fact, expressed its approval of and satisfaction at the bomb-throwing and other outrages in Chicago and boastfully claimed that the dynamite bomb had attained American rights. There was at once a revolution of public sympathy throughout this part of the country. The working men of Seattle are generally intelligent, loyal and patriotic. They have nothing in common with the bomb-thrower or his sympathizer. Hundreds who had formerly looked upon the leadership of this clique of industrial plotters with more or less favor turned from them, and their power is waning almost hourly.
“Instead of the platitudes of organized labor, [they revealed] the hideous visage of anarchism.”
This 1886 editorial captures the exact moment organized labor in Seattle pivoted away from militant, insurrectionary radicalism toward the institutional, pragmatic unionism that would define the city’s labor history for the next century. It mirrors modern debates over protest tactics, where movements often struggle to maintain public support when fringe violence or extreme rhetoric is associated with their broader political goals.
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