Survival in a Mill Town

For many years, the 1916 Everett Massacre that systematically killed countless mill workers has been swept away. There has been a sort of amnesia about that Bloody Sunday and a strange sort of immunity for the civic leaders who brutalized lumber workers. These were sawmill workers who had moved families to the Washington state frontier on promises made in handbills. What the new settlers found were mud streets filled with saloons and robber barons who exploited them. The timber barons bought homesteads of penniless settlers at cheap prices to acquire huge tracks of virgin timber. Almost overnight, they leveled mountains to fuel mills that ran day and night in a powerful economic engine which the city fathers protected at all cost, silencing grumbling from workers who were typically paid two bits an hour. If you voiced your concerns at a designated speakers' corner in town, that identified you as a troublemaker and possibly a communist. City leaders organized vigilante strike forces with police and business leaders who put down the insurrection as threats to the economic interests of the town. This early look at the American labor movement comes through the eyes of two generations who survived the struggles.