Centralia, 1919: a Tragedy of Clashing Visions

Weil Page 1 4/23/2018

Centralia, 1919: A Tragedy of Clashing Visions

Tourists who trek through southwest Washington, browsing their guidebooks for sights to see and things to do, tend to learn less about Centralia’s present than they do about its past: specifically, about the events of November 11, 1919. For example, the

Rough Guide to the Pacific Northwest has this to say:

Along the route of the I-5 itself, there’s precious little to detain you, though the workaday, lumber town of Centralia, 23 miles from Olympia, is of passing interest as the site of one of the nastiest incidents in the history of Washington’s Wobblies: during the Armistice Day parade of 1919, several members of the American Legion attacked the town’s union building (at 807 North Tower St.) and, in the fight that followed, four were shot. Local Wobblies were promptly rounded up and thrown into jail, but vigilantes broke in that night to seize, mutilate, and then lynch one of their number, a certain Wesley Everest. To make sure others took the point, the police laid the body out on the jail floor. (Jepson and Lee 210)

The Rough Guide says nothing else about Centralia: no steer toward fishing, hiking, antiquing, or even the Olympic Club. Their snapshot of Centralia’s past cuts off its rich railroad history, Washington’s oldest two-year college, and even George Washington, the first African-American in the state to found a city. In contrast, Everett, Washington, where more died in 1916 in a clash between local vigilantes and Wobblies, gets nice coverage of local scenes and escapes any mention of labor violence (210). Moon

Handbooks: Washington offers a few pages on Centralia’s sights, but what dominates its

“Twin Cities” section? A bold-faced, banner-headlined section on the “Wobbly War”

(Pitcher 338-43). Though online historical sources say more, they, too, emphasize the

“Centralia Massacre” (see the University of Washington Libraries’ Digital Collections;

Bonney, “Snapshot History”). November 11, 1919, seems to be the historical moment that defines Centralia for the world beyond Lewis County. Weil Page 2 4/23/2018

What the Rough Guide says is not technically incorrect: by November 15, 1919, six men were dead1, many others wounded, and the lives of still more had been derailed by “the terror on Tower Avenue,” as it has been described by John McClelland, founder of the Washington State Historical Society’s quarterly journal and author of Wobbly War

(McClelland, “Terror,” 65-72). However, the Guide’s account lacks context, and its flippant tone may prompt thoughtful passers-by to ask: what caused this tragedy? Why did the tension between the Industrial Workers of the World and the Legionnaires erupt in murderous violence? Why could no compromise be forged between laborers and businessmen, all of whom depended on the logging industry?

Investigating these questions suggests that the Centralia Tragedy was caused not only by conditions in the logging camps and mills of southwest Washington—though those conditions set the stage—but also by two opposed visions of what American progress meant, visions so irreconcilable that they made the tragedy all but inevitable.

The Industrial Workers of the World (hereafter, Wobblies) believed that loggers should earn a much larger share of the profits that their hard labor and risks helped lumber manufacturers earn (McClelland, Wobbly War, 29). Ultimately, their goal was that the workers actually should own the means of production, according to attorney Tom

Copeland, biographer of Elmer Smith, the lawyer who provided legal counsel to the

Wobblies (22). Beliefs and emotions ran equally strongly on the other side of the argument: as Robert L. Tyler, professor of labor history at Wagner College, notes in

Rebels of the Woods: the I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest, many involved in lumber management—owners of logging camps, mill owners, and lumber manufacturers—had

1 The sixth man was John Haney, “a Tenino farmer,” shot in the woods on November 15 as posses rounded up union members (McClelland, Wobbly War, 91) Weil Page 3 4/23/2018 worked their way up from the laboring classes and believed that the economic risks they faced—unstable markets, scheming railroads, and skyrocketing taxes—entitled them to what they could gain: that was, after all, the American dream (Rebels, 86).

World War One put these divergent views on a collision course. The veterans who attacked the union hall saw the Wobblies as “timber beasts,” Socialist radicals who wanted to take that dream away from those willing to work for it (Copeland 21). In turn, the Wobblies saw them as tools of a system that put business ahead of human lives, according to Wobbly testimony compiled in Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the

I.W.W. (Bird et al. 11-15). These clashing visions caused the deaths of November 11,

1919, and forged Centralia’s reputation as “the town with a secret”—a “secret” that remained the focus of newspapers like the Seattle Times when, almost eighty years later,

Centralia’s Mural Project unveiled its tribute to Wesley Everest and the I.W.W.

(Anderson 2-4).

There is little point trying to assign blame for the events of 1919 or their aftermath: blame changes nothing. Yet the recurring patterns of labor violence in the

United States, from the Haymarket disaster and Homestead Massacre of the late 19th century, through the Centralia Tragedy and beyond, suggest that there is good reason to ask why the visions of loggers and entrepreneurs proved so irreconcilable that they cost six people their lives and many others years of misery. In the title of his biography of

Elmer Smith, Tom Copeland redefined the massacre and its aftermath as the “Centralia

Tragedy”: to learn what caused that tragedy demands detailed exploration of the realities of both the workers’ and the owners’ economic lives and values. Weil Page 4 4/23/2018

Conditions in the logging camps of southwest Washington made unionizing for a better lot seem natural. Workers faced grueling ten-hour days, six days a week; they ate food that was often bad; they slept in crowded, lice-ridden, chronically damp bunkhouses; and they endured sanitation that was even worse (McClelland, WW 4-5, 63;

Copeland 21). A 1917-18 U.S. Department of Labor study of southwest Washington’s logging conditions stated that “half the camps had only crude wooden bunks, half had no bathing facilities, and half were infested with bedbugs” (Tyler, Rebels, 90). Workers faced high risks from living in debilitating conditions: asthma and other lung conditions were common among those who lived in logging camps. So were on the job injuries, such as being crushed by a falling log as it was shot along a precarious skid-road (89-91).

Sawmills were dangerous, too, as northwest labor historian Norman H. Clark explains in

Mill Town: for example, in Everett, over 50% of shingle-weavers suffered debilitating injuries, losing fingers or entire hands to rusty saws (97-98).

What were timber industry workers paid for their long days and physical dangers?

Shingle weavers earned $4.50 a day, but they had the most effective union in the industry

(not a Wobbly union); lumber mill workers earned $2.25 per day (93); an average daily wage for mill workers and logging camp laborers was $3.00 per ten-hour day

(McClelland, WW, 4). At the same time, in a typical paper mill, the “average annual value produced by the average . . . worker was $2,471.00,” but “his average annual wage was $519.00” (Clark 116; emphasis added). This sharp contrast between what workers earned and the value they produced fueled discontent.

To evaluate the loggers’ claims that wages were unfair, these figures must be translated into 21st-century terms. Adjusted for inflation, a dollar in 1919 was the Weil Page 5 4/23/2018 equivalent of $11.98 in 2007; a monthly wage of $90.00 in 1919 would have been worth

$1,078.44 in 2007 dollars (“Cost of Living Calculator”). What would that $90 actually have bought in Centralia in 1919? This is difficult to assess, not only because of inflation, but because of differences in how things are produced and valued. J. Bradford

Delong, professor of economics at the University of California-Berkeley, has constructed a webpage devoted to comparative economic values between the late 19th and 20th centuries. Delong notes that modern Americans and those living in the late 19th century would see different things as necessities. For example, antibiotics were not available; even if health insurance or workman’s compensation had been, workers could not have purchased effective medical help because it did not yet exist (9-10). Comparing and contrasting low-income earners of 1890 and 1991, Delong explains that in 1890, workers would have had better access to affordable housing and food, but worse access to clothing, transportation, and health care (10).

Though it is difficult to translate the dollar context of 1919 Wobbly workers into terms relevant today, there is another way to address the question of comparable value: could they afford to buy homes for their families? As noted earlier, workers in logging camps were provided with lodging, food, and firewood as part of their pay: while in the camps, they could presumably save most wages earned, depending on whether they were supporting families. In such a situation, loggers might be able to do rather well, perhaps eventually saving enough to put buying a modest home within reach. A mill worker in

Everett—who did not have room and board paid for—could, if he were thrifty and managed to avoid career-ending injuries, carry a ten to fifteen year mortgage on a small, single-family home (Clark 80). In fact, many logging companies urged their workers to Weil Page 6 4/23/2018 get married, believing that this would “’domesticate the logger’” and cut the growth of

I.W.W. memberships, according to Dr. Laurie Mercier, associate professor of labor history at WSU-Vancouver (64).

However, one additional problem faced logging industry laborers, one that might have derailed their marital ambitions: they could not count on steady work. When operations were not profitable, the owners closed the works, and when the works were closed, no wages were paid. There was no severance pay, let alone unemployment insurance, and no welfare. Yet the typical “industrial work year was only 129 days”

(Clark 132). At a dollar a day, workers in a logging camp, then, earned, on average,

$129/year, or $1,545.42 in 2007 dollars (“Calculator”). These wages had been fairly constant: yet the cost of living had been rising, on average, 6% per year since 1909 (Clark

151). Meanwhile, the value of the dollar declined steadily from 1913 to 1920

(“Calculator”).

Facing a rising cost of living, a declining dollar, static wages, and lacking income to purchase food, shelter, clothing, and fuel whenever the logging camps were closed, loggers had real difficulty advancing in material wealth and social class. In short, achieving the American dream of owning one’s own home and supporting one’s family posed a genuine challenge for workers in the timber industry. In this context, the

Wobblies’ argument that workers deserved a greater share of the profits must have had appealed powerfully to many in the timber industry: it helps explain the I.W.W.’s success recruiting new members, both in the mills and woods.

Now to the other side of the equation: what were the costs and benefits for the owners of the logging camps, the mills, and the manufacturing plants? These figures are Weil Page 7 4/23/2018 even harder to evaluate, because, as Clark notes in Mill Town, “there were no normal years in this industry” (72). There were some great success stories, of course, particularly for the entrepreneurs encouraged to move to Washington by Jim Hill, the power behind the Great Northern railroad (58-65). According to a 1917 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, timberland that in 1900 was “virtually worthless” had risen “fifty-fold” by

1917, “the increment exceeding comfortably the estimated six per cent cost of taxes, fire protection, and office expense in merely holding the land” (qtd. in Tyler, Rebels, 7).

Brown’s Bay Logging Company sold shares to friends at $100 apiece in 1906 and cashed out, after logging its tracts and liquidating all land and equipment, at $650 a share in 1916

(Clark 73). There were boom years like 1906, when the fire that followed the San

Francisco Earthquake led to enormous demand for lumber—and Washington businessmen could float logs down the coast to their market, bypassing the cutthroat railroad barons and the notorious price hikes with which they saddled lumber manufacturers in years when profits looked healthy (74).

For most lumber entrepreneurs in most years, however, the industry was risky at best. It was not unusual to have to lay out “capitalizations of $50,000 to $100,000 . . . in land leases, timber rights, machinery, and initial payrolls” (Clark 73). But the rush on forests in the Northwest meant that too many forests were opened too quickly: there were too many timber operations, and “chronic overproduction” (68). As a result, overproduction led to oversupply and prices plummeted: the owners had to cut their wood—and sell it at cut rate—just to pay their debts. As Clark explains, “It was a mad world in which a diminishing demand for their products and a falling price level forced hundreds of mill-owners to produce 24 hours a day until a glutted market refused to take Weil Page 8 4/23/2018 another stick or shingle” (68). Only the biggest operators had the resources to float through a bad season in hope of better times ahead.

Supply and demand problems were not the only challenges faced by those who owned lumber businesses. Railroads could devour lumber profits by cutting back on available shipping cars or jacking up rates, and in a slim year, they could destroy a mill owner’s profit margin (Clark 70). Then there were Washington’s land taxes, which shot up 300 per cent from 1905 to 1907, to cite one particularly extreme fluctuation (70). Most lumber entrepreneurs were far richer on paper than in practice, and they had virtually no control of the economic factors that affected their business.

In this context, it is not hard to see why owners of lumber businesses had little tolerance for labor complaints. Wages were one of the few costs they could control, and they fought to do so. The I.W.W. fought back. In 1917, when World War One drove up demand for lumber—particularly the buoyant sitka spruce so sought after by ship- builders (McClelland, WW, 33)—the Wobblies led a successful strike that “paralyzed” the Pacific northwest lumber industry (Tyler, “Violence,” 116). The federal government sent in moderators to settle the strike so that military needs for timber could be met. As a result, the Wobblies won their sole enduring success: they led the strike that succeeded in bringing to the northwest timber industry what most workers around the rest of the nation already enjoyed—the eight hour day. Only intervention by federal negotiators sent by President Wilson made this settlement possible, but the owners blamed the

Wobblies (McClelland, WW, 33).

Although the eight hour day was won, discontent over still-unaddressed working conditions continued to mount; the Wobblies’ membership numbers grew. According to Weil Page 9 4/23/2018

Fred Thompson, a Wobbly who edited the I.W.W.’s newspaper, The Industrial Worker, and wrote two histories of the union, by the end of 1919, 20,000 I.W.W. members were lumber workers, representing roughly “half of lumberjacks and . . . one-sixth of mill workers” in the Northwest (Thompson and Murfin 131). Of those, 8,000 new logging industry workers had joined the I.W.W. in 1919 alone (131).

These numbers, naturally, concerned businessmen. Particularly for self-made entrepreneurs, the issues looked quite different. “As one Westerner expressed the

[businessman’s perspective]: ‘I have lived in the woods, worked in the lumber mills, slept on the ground, eaten rough fare, blistered my hands, worked 16 hours a day—and worked out of it into something better. Why should any husky man make such a ‘holler’ about working conditions’”? (Tyler, Rebels, 86) This was a classic American vision: people worked their way up, then reaped their rewards (Clark 65-66). The hero of The Timber

Beast, historical novelist Archie Binns’ fictionalization of the Everett Massacre, puts it more bluntly: “’[Workers] who had homes and families here [had rights], yes. Not the

Wobblies; they didn’t own anything and they didn’t believe we had a right to own our timber. When people threaten what you have, you crush them any way you can’” (208).

Both sides believed that they, and only they, were in the right. For the workers, wages remained low and unstable; yet, for the owners, the market’s instability made sharing their gains with the labor force unrealistic, a flirtation with bankruptcy (Clark

233). Clark sums up the problem poignantly: “The sad truth . . . was that the timber industry . . . in a competitive society at that level of industrialization, was not and could not be a humane system. There were too many mills, too many workers, too many Weil Page 10 4/23/2018 inefficient machines” (235). In the end, the industry only stabilized after improvements in machinery revolutionized it in the 1920s (235)—years after the Centralia tragedy.

Against this backdrop of lumber economics in western Washington, the events that led up to the Centralia tragedy come into sharper focus. In Centralia, resentment of

Wobblies began to erupt into violence as early as 1914, when a union member who tried to organize local electrical workers was run off by the sheriff (Copeland 23). Early the next year, the University of Washington’s digital history project reports, “47 members of the I.W.W., unemployed and homeless, came to Centralia looking for food and shelter”

(“The Centralia Massacre,” par. 1). This was not unusual for homeless workers.

However, this time, deputized residents marched the Wobblies to the Southwest

Washington Fairgrounds; after eight came back to tell townspeople that the men would come back and stay until they got food, the group was rounded up and sent to Chehalis

(Copeland 24), where they were put on a train to Portland (McClelland 2-3). Matters worsened in 1917, the year that saw not only the Wobblies’ victory in the battle for the eight hour day, but the Bolshevik Revolution. From then onward, Wobblies would be seen by lumber magnates—and by their sons who went to war in Europe—as Socialists whose goal was to destroy the fabric of American business (53).

It is true that Wobblies advocated workers’ ownership of the camps and the mills.

(Copeland 22) As the I.W.W.’s own published history records—and as their website proclaims today—the rhetoric of their union preamble was Socialist in tone and intent:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. . . . It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.” (Thompson and Murfin, frontispiece; “Preamble,” par. 1) Weil Page 11 4/23/2018

It is not hard to see why many loggers—homeless, jobless, and hungry when the camps were not producing—adopted this philosophy. Yet, as British labor historian Patrick

Renshaw notes, because Wobblies sympathized with the Bolsheviks and opposed the war in principle, Legionnaires who returned to Centralia saw them as traitors—even though many Wobblies had also fought with courage after they had been drafted (164).

The Wobblies’ question was why the war was being fought at all. They believed that the U.S. should focus on improving lives at home (“I.W.W. in Washington,” par. 1;

McClelland, WW, 27). Wobblies saw the wartime working class suffering while “war profiteers” in business reaped great profits—as, in fact, manufacturers and suppliers of weapons, ships, dry goods and more did (McClelland 28, 56). Legionnaires returning from the war wanted to take part in this drive toward business success; they resented

Wobblies’ criticisms of the society that they had fought—and their friends had died—to protect (Copeland 40).

This incompatibility of views was captured in the songs sung by the Wobblies to rally members in their halls and at their protests. The Wobblies’ notorious “Little Red

Songbook” bore this legend on its cover: “To Fan the Flames of Discontent.” Their songwriters took popular tunes, changed their lyrics, and mocked the values they originally represented. For example, “Sweet Bye and Bye” became “The Preacher and the Slave,” turning messages of patient waiting for heavenly rewards into “Work and pray, live on hay, / You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (that’s a lie)” (I.W.W. Songs,

9). The song, as re-written, embodies the Wobblies’ bitterness and ends with a jab in the eye for the timber bosses:

Long-haired preachers come out every night Weil Page 12 4/23/2018

Trying to tell you what’s wrong from what’s right But when asked “how ‘bout something to eat?” They will answer in voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye In that glorious land above the sky (way up high) Work and pray, live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (that’s a lie).

In the starvation army they play, And they sing and they clap and they pray. Till they get all your coin on the drum, Then they tell you when you are on the bum: [refrain]

‘If you fight hard for children and wife— Try to get something good in this life— You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell, When you die you will sure go to hell. [refrain]

Workingmen of all countries unite, Side by side we for freedom will fight: When the world and its wealth we have gained To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:

You will eat, bye and bye, When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry; Chop some wood, ‘twill do you good, And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye (that’s no lie).’ (9)

“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” became “It’s a Long Way Down to the Soupline”:

It’s a long way down to the soupline, It’s a long way to go. It’s a long way down to the soupline And the soup is thin I know. Goodbye, good old porkchops, Farewell, beefsteak rare; It’s a long, long way down to the soupline, But my soup is there. (“I.W.W. Songs” 28) Weil Page 13 4/23/2018

It is not hard to imagine how returning soldiers who had hummed that tune in France, thinking of returning to homes and loved ones, resented the Wobblies’ transforming it into a jab—equally deeply felt—at evaporating American opportunities.

Views of Wobblies as un-American radicals contributed to the attack on the first

Wobbly Hall in Centralia in 1918, during the May 18th Memorial Day parade. The hall was overrun, their books and pamphlets were burned, and their phonograph and desk auctioned off to benefit the Red Cross (Copeland 37; McClelland, WW, 52). To understand the tenor of the times, one must realize that this destruction and theft of property was actually seen as patriotic. The Legionnaires felt that the red-leaning

Wobblies had no right to be in Centralia at all: to them, it seemed quite appropriate to auction off Wobbly property to benefit an agency that served the public good. Local law enforcement seemed tacitly to agree: even though the Wobblies had not broken any laws, no arrests were made for the destruction and theft of their property. The Wobblies themselves were beaten in a gauntlet and run out of town. (Copeland 37) Some weeks after they were gone, a “partially blind” newsvendor who sold “subversive” I.W.W. newspapers was seized, driven to Thurston County, left by the roadside, and told never to come back. These actions, too, met with neither police nor legal action (McClelland,

WW, 52-53).

The members of the Citizen’s Commission who planned the 1919 attack on the

I.W.W. hall in Centralia believed that they were removing a social cancer (McClelland

49-50). After their attack on the hall resulted in the Wobblies’ shooting four of their members, their beliefs were reflected in the Centralia Chronicle’s editorial of November

12, 1919: Weil Page 14 4/23/2018

The dastardly deed committed by the I.W.W.’s yesterday spells the doom of the red element in Centralia and vicinity. The deplorable part is that these despicable parasites of humanity have made Centralia one of their nesting places for the past three years. The climax was sure to come, but nobody anticipated that the offensive would come from these cowardly skunks. Nothing but vengeance now will satisfy the citizens of this city, who have with patience tolerated this scum of creation for lo, these years . . . [the] red- handed revolutionist [is] getting his just desserts . . . The people are tired of temporizing with a class of human beings whose evident intent is revolution.” (qtd. in Nix and Nix 11)

In contrast, the Wobblies, beaten and jailed repeatedly by citizens and police across the northwest, believed that they were fighting for their lives and values. After the war, Wobbly rhetoric heated up in part because the regular attacks they endured simply for being union members radicalized them (McClelland 54). After the trial of the

Centralia Wobblies in 1920, I.W.W. spokesman Ralph Chaplin wrote that:

In the year 1918 a union hall stood on one of the side streets in Centralia. . . . This was not, however, the hall in which the Armistice Day tragedy took place. You must always remember that there were two halls raided in Centralia; one in 1918 and another in 1919. The loggers did not defend the first hall and many of them were manhandled by the mob that wrecked it. The loggers did defend the second and were given as a reward a hanging. . . . No member of the mob has ever been punished or even taken to task for his misdeed. (Chaplin 28)

In the days prior to the 1919 violence, under the advice of Elmer Smith, the

Wobblies wrote and circulated a pamphlet in Centralia, warning townspeople that the citizen’s group was planning to attack the Wobbly Hall during the Armistice Day parade and pleading for the townspeople to see their right to organize in peace. However, there was no public move to support these rights (Copeland 47-48). Seeing none, the Wobblies acted on the rest of Smith’s advice—that they would be legally justified if they fought back in self-defense, provided that the Legionnaires struck first (McClelland 64;

Copeland 46). Copeland reports that as the Wobblies prepared for the second Armistice Weil Page 15 4/23/2018

Day, they lacked any one unified plan. Some went to the Avalon Hotel, across the street, armed and ready to respond if the hall was attacked; others stationed themselves on

Seminary Hill; and many I.W.W. members inside the hall were unaware of these actions

(Copeland, email of 23 Aug 2009).

The stage was set for tragedy. When the parade stopped outside the hall and Dr.

Frank Bickford led the charge inside, the Wobblies fired (McClelland 73). McElfresh was evidently killed immediately; Warren Grimm was struck and died at the hospital, hours later, as did Ben Casagrande, shot in the stomach as he tried to escape the gunfire

(Copeland 52-53). Dale Hubbard, nephew of one of the local timber entrepreneurs who had helped organize the citizen’s commission against the Wobblies (44-46), was shot by

I.W.W. member Wesley Everest at the river, and evidently died on the scene (53). That night, Everest was taken from the city jail during a power outage and driven to a bridge over the Chehalis River, where he was lynched and hung. All Wobblies in the hall who had not escaped were jailed, awaiting a trial they felt sure could not be fair and which remains controversial to this day.

Given how the two sides viewed each other, the violence seems to have been virtually unavoidable. It is worth noting that the criminal syndicalism laws that arose from the “Red Scare” of the war years would have made deporting the Wobblies from town not only possible, but legal. This was the course that Centralia’s chief of police wanted to pursue, only to be told that he was “misinterpreting” the law by the city’s attorney—a member of the citizen’s commission that planned the raid—and the state’s attorney general agreed (McClelland 47; 59-60). The two sides never sat down to Weil Page 16 4/23/2018 negotiate, and so the deaths of November 11th, as well as their tragic impact on the survivors, became unavoidable.

The philosopher Hegel famously defined tragedy as “the war of right with right.”

The idea that workers and owners of industries shared an “identity of interest” —the belief that as productivity increased, all standards of living would rise together—died in the late 19th century amid the economic panics that plunged so many businesses into bankruptcy, laborers into unemployment, and workplaces into violence. In labor historian Nell Irvin Painter’s startling label, by the early years of the 20th century, the nation saw itself “Standing at Armageddon.” (Painter xxix-xx). Against this backdrop,

Hegel’s definition of tragedy seems an apt caption for what happened in Centralia on

November 11, 1919. Those who died were casualties of warring ideas about American progress.

In these early years of the 21st century, the Centralia Tragedy’s complex backdrop has been largely forgotten outside classrooms of economic history. The collapse of the

Soviet Union has made socialism appear a defeated philosophy, and the memory that war between labor and capital here in America once looked almost inevitable has been all but lost. Today’s image of the period’s logging laborers appears in the burly, healthy- looking stereotype of WPA murals and Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers.

Amid such nostalgia, the notoriety of the Centralia Tragedy stands out as an apparent exception. If Centralia is to transcend this reputation and become viewed in ways more expansive than contemporary histories and travel guides suggest, the city needs to acknowledge and clarify that its past is one among many examples of a terrible chapter in Weil Page 17 4/23/2018

American business and labor relations—not a bizarre anomaly. If it does not, Centralia risks remaining labeled a lonely exception to a mythic portrait of progress.

Works Cited

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Binns, Archie. The Timber Beast. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971 (1st printing Scribner & Sons, 1944).

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“The Centralia Massacre.” University of Washington Libraries: Digital Collections: Centralia Massacre Collection. 2005. 26 Jan. 2005

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Illinois, 1936. 26th edition. (N.b.: better known today as “The Little Red Songbook”)

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Mercier, Laurie. “Reworking Race, Class, and Gender into Pacific Northwest History.” Frontiers. Vol. 22, No. 3, January 2001. (Supplement: “Women’s West”) 61-65. Proquest. Centralia College, Washington. Kirk Library. 1 Mar. 2005. < http://www.proquest.com >

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------“Violence at Centralia, 1919.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly. No. 40, October 1954, 116-124. (N.b.: This article was ordered through Inter-Library Loan, not accessed through a library database.)

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