This Day in Labor History: November 11, 1919. The American Legion decides to tear apart the IWW hall in Centralia, WA. The IWW defends itself and 4 die, leading to lynching of IWW organizer. Let's spend Veterans' Day talking about how the Legion was a proto-fascist organization. 
Timber workers lived awful, horrible lives. They logged far away from towns in water-soaked, all-male camps with nothing to do. They died at grotesque rates from drowning and industrial accidents. The timber camp operators didn't care. At least until the loggers organized.
The Industrial Workers of the World started seriously organizing in the timber camps after 1912. Before that, the IWW was pushing ideology over organizing. After that, organizing started winning out. Letting workers set the agenda proved a great way to organize.
Why would loggers join the IWW? Let me tell you a story I found while researching.
In 1917, a Red Cross doctor toured the timber camps of eastern Oregon. He reported of one camp where about 80 men lived in one bunkhouse. This was common. These bunkhouses were disgusting, smelly, poorly built, over heated and freezing at the same time, with zero sanitation.
These 80 men in the bunkhouse shared one sink. At the sink was one towel. For all 80 men. One day, a new logger came into the bunkhouse. He had gonorrhea. He used the towel. A gonorrhea outbreak occurred--in the men's eyes.
I actually asked my doctor about that. He said it was possible if the gonorrhea never dried. Which on a towel in a logging camp shared by 80 men would happen.
This is why they organized with the IWW. By 1917, they were striking and winning real concessions from employers over the 8-hour day and working conditions. The strikes threatened the government's ability to get the right wood to build airplanes during WWI. So it intervened.
The military came into the forests, effectively banned the IWW, created a militarized company union called the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, sent soldiers out to log. It also forced the owners to grant basically every IWW demand to clean up the camps.
This was a huge victory for the workers and a huge loss for the IWW. And in fact, worker interest in the IWW collapsed once the working and living conditions were improved. IWW documents show growing frustration over the inability to organize anymore, even outside the repression.
But of course, the IWW still had adherents. Meanwhile, World War I ended, the government pulled out of the timber industry, but the employers kept up the Four-L as a voluntary industry wide company union. The American Legion was formed and the Red Scare was on.
The American Legion was not a kindly organization for old veterans building halls to drink cheap beer, which is how it is largely seen today. It was a right-wing organization to promote militaristic and conservative values. And it was violent.
The IWW had a hall in Centralia, Washington, a town about halfway between Portland and Seattle. In 1918, local citizens had busted it up. It IWW rebuilt. In 1919, the American Legion decided to use the Armistice Day parade as a moment to stop the parade and crush the IWW for good
But the IWW had heard this was going to happen. They asked a sympathetic lawyer what to do. He said they had the right to defend their property. So they got their guns and were ready to fight.
When the Legion started their violent fascist action, Wobblies both in the hall and on the hill above the building opened fire. 4 Legionnaires died.
Warren Grimm, a University of Washington graduate and lawyer, had not only fought in World War I, but had also served in the military’s anti-Bolshevik force in Siberia before returning to his home town of Centralia.
Arthur McElfresh had spent eighteen months in the army in France. The third dead Legionnaire was Ben Casagranda, a Greek-American who went to war for his new nation. The fourth was another University of Washington graduate and member of the Centralia elite, Dale Hubbard.
Infuriated, the Legionnaires chased a man they thought was Britt Smith, the local IWW secretary, but who in fact was Wesley Everest, an itinerant logger and IWW member. They beat him severely and threw him into a prison cell with other Wobblies they had rounded up.
That evening, incensed, local men took Everest from his jail cell and hanged him from a bridge on the Chehalis River. For years, the IWW claimed they had castrated Everest, but that almost certainly didn't happen. The IWW turned Everest into a martyr, comparing him to Christ.
Trials quickly ensued for a dozen other IWW members. A jury found eight guilty of second-degree murder, and they received sentences ranging from twenty-five to forty years at the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla.
Of course, no one from the Legion was questioned for their actions. Attacking radicals was 100% Americanism after all.
The IWW claimed that the timber industry, the American Legion, and local authorities had railroaded the eight men into prison; and their cause served as a rallying cry for an increasingly marginalized IWW over the next twenty years.
The Centralia Massacre was not the final blow for the IWW in the United States, but it was close. The official repression of the Red Scare combined with organized violence against the union to make it all but irrelevant. Internal factionalism (hello, leftists!) contributed too.
It did retain a small presence in the Northwestern woods through the 1920s and even into the late 30s, though the successful unionization of loggers in the CIO and AFL after 1935 made the organization pointless. The CIO rolled their eyes at remnant Wobblies who refused to join.
Still, loggers in 1919 and 1939 showed a great deal of respect for all the IWW had done for them.
Mentioning the Centralia Massacre quickly became totally unacceptable in the community. Literally none of the participants on the Legion side ever told their story. They all took it to the grave with them.
At some point, I think sometime in the 80s, Centralia residents commissioned a bunch of murals for their town representing their history. There are lots of scenes of white people settling the land, but nothing on Centralia.
The labor hall in town put up its own mural, though it is kind of hard to see from the road because it is on the second floor. You have to know where to look.
The building where the IWW hall was still stands, or at least it did as of 8 or 10 years ago. But you have to hunt up the address from IWW primary source documents. To say the least, there is no historical marker commemorating it. And Centralia is still a right-wing town today.
As for the American Legion, it remained a right-wing proto-fascist force for decades. It was used in southern California to beat the hell of labor organizers in the 1930s.
The Legion opposed the Bonus Army because of course it didn't actually stand for veterans. This is what led to the growth of the VFW as an alternative veterans organization.
The Legion was all about McCarthyism and other right-wing 50s causes. In short, the American Legion was and is an awful organization. Let's remember that on this Veterans' Day.
Back tomorrow to discuss the New Orleans General Strike of 1892.
Oh yeah, I also wrote in great detail about all of this in my book Empire of Timber, which demonstrates how timber workers used their unions to promote their own brands of environmentalism through the 20th century.
amazon.com/gp/product/110…
amazon.com/gp/product/110…
