Wobbly War: The Centralia Story [B1934]

1987 HCDJ in nice clean condition. A book about PNW regional labor disputes and the bloody 1919 Centralia Massacre - from John McClelland, a local journalist, author, and historian who helped initiate the WA State historical preservation program - published by the Washington State Historical Society.

From the front jacket flap: "Labor came into the twentieth century fighting. The fiercest fighters were the Wobblies the Industrial Workers of the World-fighting against the implacable opponents of all that they stood for, including such goals as the eight-hour day. An employer class, recently emerged from the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, was by no means ready for higher labor costs. This book is about that conflict as it pertains to the IWW, and it focuses on the most dramatic and violent episode of what amounted to a war of extermination-the Centralia case. In Centralia on Armistice Day, 1919, the slaying by IWW members of Legionnaires on parade shocked the nation and caused enraged local citizens to commit a lynching.

The Centralia case was no soon-to-be-forgotten affair. For the next decade the Centralia case was in the news-first the long trial and subsequent appeals, then the taking of the case to the public as IWW partisans shouted their outrage at the conviction of men who, far from being terrorists, were defending their hall against an attack they were sure was coming. The men who were convicted in the Centralia case came to be regarded as "class-war prisoners," and in time inspired the sympathies of many prominent persons as well as those who succeeded the Wobblies in advocating industrial unionism-members of the CIO. Theirs was a cause célèbre in the tradition of the Haymarket and Sacco-Vanzetti cases.

Much of what has been published about the case over the years is either biased, incomplete, or inaccurate. Wobbly War, the research for which extended over some twenty years, is, as Professor Richard Maxwell Brown writes in the foreword, "much more than a chronicle of events. Readers will find here an objective, analytical treatment of the issues raised by the conflict in Centralia and its violent climax. In the course of exhaustive research in oral as well as archival sources, John McClelland, Jr., uncovered much new material. All readers will be absorbed in the story, and scholars will find especially useful the richness of detail and explanation."