If you don’t live there, it’s easy to see Centralia,
Washington as nothing but an urban milestone. The small city is about 85 miles
from Seattle and 90 miles from Portland, and if you’re rushing up or down I-5
its name is handily precise. When you see that Burgerville and the string of
factory outlet stores on the banks of the Skookumchuck River you know you’re at
the midpoint of your journey.
The humdrum geographic literalism of the name, though, hints
at Centralia’s past – and why it became synonymous with one of the most
infamous, grisly incidents in the Northwest’s infamous, grisly labor history. A
hundred years ago, Centralia was the confluence of four major railroads, and
all the products of Southwest Washington passed through its streets. Its depots
were jammed with lumber and coal. Its tree-lined avenues housed conservative
burghers while the surrounding country teemed with dispossessed, discontented
migrant loggers. The city was the midpoint of a social conflict building to
explosion.
With all that in mind, I pulled off at Centralia on my way
down to Portland last week.
Since the closure of the coal mine a few years ago, the center
of economic gravity has tilted towards the ugly strip of drive-thrus and
clearance clothing emporia you may have seen from the highway, but the real
town lies over the Skookumchuck behind a line of trees. I was welcomed by a
clutch of old men in orange hi-vis waving anti-abortion signs at oncoming
traffic outside the Planned Parenthood clinic. They were exhorting drivers to
honk in solidarity, but nobody did. I slipped past them into the handsome brick
downtown.
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| Fig. 2.1: Tower Avenue at Main. As I parked, a freight train roared through town a block away – I couldn’t have timed it better for the blog if I’d tried. |
Almost uniquely for the region, Centralia was founded by an
African-American pioneer. The memorably named George Washington was born
free in Virginia in 1817 and raised on the Midwestern frontier. Like thousands
of other Missouri residents, Washington followed the Oregon Trail west in 1850.
Upon arrival in the Northwest, though, Washington found himself barred from
staking a claim under the territory’s black exclusion laws. (I’m sure I’ll be touching on these odious laws again and again in
this blog.) It wasn’t until the lands north of the Columbia were hived off as
the Washington Territory, no longer subject to the exclusion laws, that George
Washington was able to claim land of his own. He incorporated his town in 1875
and served as its proprietor until his death in 1905. The city
erected a statue on his 201st birthday last August depicting Washington and his wife Mary Jane gazing at a plat map. It’s in the
park – check it out.
Centralia was central even then. There was no I-5 in those
days, but Washington had shrewdly plopped his claim equidistant on the rail
line between Kalama and Tacoma, and the town boomed. Logging began, coal was
discovered just east of town, and by the time George Washington died his town
had become a gritty hub of extractive industry.
From Tower Avenue, that past can be hard to spot until a
train rolls by. Since Centralia is now so dependent on through-traffic, the
historic district has catered to tourists, and Tower is lined with overflowing
vintage stores. Signs call attention to the city’s complement of murals, and
gorgeous neon art gleams in the sun.
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| Fig. 2.2: Some pleasant sights before we get into the nasty stuff. |
Just around the corner on Main, though, the American Legion post still flies its flag, and it’s here that my morbid walking tour really began.
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Enter the Wobblies. The Industrial Workers of the World was
a revolutionary syndicalist union based in Chicago, but it found its greatest
adherents out West, where loggers and miners were attracted to its unflinching
militancy and its rejection of the AFL’s elitist hierarchies. Wobblies in the
Rockies fought dynamite wars with corporate goon squads and Pinkerton detectives. In
the Northwest, IWW agitation swept through the logging camps. Organization was
met by deadly reprisals from employers, and during the First World War the
entire lumber industry was put under military control to prevent Wobbly
interference with wartime production.
It was the start of a coordinated wave of repression against
the IWW that only worsened after the war was over. The postwar years were a
paranoid and conservative era, and in many places, the American Legion became
the standard-bearers of anti-labor reaction. The Legion was a patriotic
veterans’ organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and at its very
first convention it demanded that Congress “immediately depor[t] every one of
those Bolsheviks or Industrial Workers of the World.”
The small IWW hall in Centralia, Local 500, had been under
constant attack since it opened in 1917. Sympathizers faced constant harassment
and petty arrests. In April 1918, the Wobbly office in the Roderick Hotel was
raided and vandalized by a vigilante gang, and anyone with the misfortune to be in the building was dragged into the
street and beaten. Knowing that another raid would be coming soon, the Wobblies
armed themselves.
The Roderick Hotel sat on the corner of Tower and 2nd,
about eight blocks’ walk from the Legion post. Today this is the northern end
of downtown, where small automotive businesses rub shoulders with private residences.
In 1919, this was the end of the Armistice Day parade route.
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| Fig. 2.4: There’s no historical marker in sight, but this is the corner where it all happened. The auto shop sits on the site of the Roderick Hotel. |
On November 11, 1919, the newly formed Centralia American
Legion took their place in the Armistice Day parade, alongside businessmen and vigilantes
armed with rubber hoses, pipes, and nooses. As they neared the end of the parade route, a
group of Legionnaires led by the post commander Warren Grimm slowed and broke
off. They wheeled around to face the Roderick Hotel.
The Wobblies’ snipers – posted
at the Roderick’s windows and on surrounding rooftops – opened fire on the men that appeared to be advancing on their hall. In moments, Warren
Grimm and two other Legionnaires collapsed dead. Other paraders burst into the
hotel. The Wobblies in the building were seized by the crowd – apart from two
of the snipers, who managed to slip out the back. One, “John Doe” Davis,
disappeared, never to be seen again. The other, Wesley Everest, fled across town, shooting and killing one of his pursuers before being apprehended
on the banks of the Skookumchuck while attempting to reload. As he was marched
back, he refused to speak to his captors.
The Wobblies were thrown in jail, and the entire contents of
the union hall were dragged into the street and heaped on a bonfire.
That night, the power went out in Centralia. Under cover of
darkness, a group of men pulled Wesley Everest from his cell. Not only was he
the only confirmed killer, in his silence he had been mistaken for Local 500
leader Britt Smith, and as the presumed ringleader, he would have to die. Everest was thrown in a truck, driven to a bridge over the Chehalis River, and lynched.
While his body hung from the bridge, it was shot again and again.
Everest’s body was brought back to the jail with the rope
still knotted around his neck, and the other prisoners were forced to bury him.
He was 28 years old. Born in Newberg, Oregon, he’d spent his life working in
the Northwest woods; during the war he’d labored under military discipline as
part of the Spruce Production Division but had spent most of his time in the
brig for refusing to salute the flag.
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| Fig. 2.5: The view from the Mellen Street Bridge. |
Just like at the site of the battle itself, no memorial
exists where the lynching took place. The current bridge was erected in 1959
and looks like any other span in the rural Northwest: same blue-green paint,
same Erector Set superstructure. Far from a lonely road, Mellen Street is now
spanned by the interstate and the bridge is bounded on one end by a WSDOT
carpool lot. Traffic roared by as I walked back and forth, looking for the
stumps of the older bridge and coming up empty. Only one grim echo caught my
eye: an old tire swing, dangling from a tree into the river.
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| Fig. 2.6: A morbid metaphor. |
No one was ever charged with Everest’s death, but the other
captives were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The trial – a media
circus conducted in a courtroom packed with uniformed Legionnaires – ended with
seven IWW members being convicted of murder and sentenced to between 25 and 40
years in prison. Sixteen-year-old Loren Roberts was pronounced insane and
institutionalized. Despite outcry about the slanted verdict, even from the
conservative labor bosses of the AFL, the men would remain in prison for years.
The last of the Centralia Wobblies wasn’t freed until 1939.
Over the next few years, the IWW was reduced to a shadow of
its former self. Activists were jailed, deported, or killed, and any remaining revolutionary
activity began to reorient itself around the Communist Party. By the time the
Centralia defendants were being freed, the Northwest woods were finally being
organized, albeit under the less radical International Woodworkers of America. The
shrinking circles of the American left remembered Wesley Everest as a martyr. Lurid
stories circulated that he had been castrated by the county coroner before he
was killed, or that he’d gone out shouting “Remember that I died for my class!”
IWW pamphleteer Ralph Chaplin popularized some of these stories in an
incendiary retelling that characterized Warren Grimm as the
frontman for a conspiracy of local business interests bent on running the
Wobblies out of town for good.
Whether or not Chaplin’s tale was true, Centralia wasn’t
interested. Back in town, in the park catty-corner from Legion Post 17 near
the sculpture of George Washington and his wife platting Centralia, stands an
idealized World War I doughboy staring stoically into the blue sky. Art Deco
letters remind visitors to the public library that THE HIGHEST OF US IS BUT A
SENTRY AT HIS POST. Around the plinth are plaques commemorating the four
Legionnaires who died a hundred years ago this fall: Ben Cassagranda, Warren
Grimm, Dale Hubbard, and Arthur McElfresh. For the better part of a century,
this was the only marker of what had happened in 1919.
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| Fig. 2.6: The Sentinel. |
A few steps to the southwest of the Sentinel, though, and
you’ll see that public memory is never so static.
The ornate Mediterranean Revival façade of Centralia Square
would be memorable enough itself, but above its entrance looms a mural of
liberatory weirdness. Beneath the motto ORGANIZACIÓN – EDUCACIÓN
– EMANCIPACIÓN, sabot cats rain from the sky, a capitalist pig lounges on
stacks of money, demons spew shit from their mouths. In the center of it all,
Wesley Everest rises from his grave, skin glowing purple like an avenging
zombie of labor, to shake his fists over the park in the direction of the
Sentinel and Legion Post 17.
The mural was commissioned in 1997 by the owner of the
building to tell the side of the story that had been carefully brushed from
Centralia’s landscape. Today’s Legionnaires were not happy, but hey, it was on
private property. Capitalism has landed a few punches since then: a later
proprietor knocked holes in the wall during a remodeling project and their
restoration efforts were less than impressive, and the balcony below is now
cluttered with swish café furniture that makes it hard to see Everest’s grave
from street level. It still catches the eye, though, and is still almost
stupefyingly radical for a piece of American public art.
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| Fig. 2.7: The Resurrection of Wesley Everest, plus café. |
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| Fig. 2.8: Full circle. |
If you’re reading this first post, you’re probably a friend
of mine and I don’t need to tell you that the conflict I followed on my morbid
walking tour is not over by a long shot. Labor radicalism and reactionary
political violence are both alive and well in the Northwest. While our economy
has moved away from the old extractive industries – logging is mechanized and
milling is outsourced, and Washington state’s thin seams of coal are no longer
profitable – corporate exploitation has never gone away. Nor has prejudice
against immigrant workers, which is often intertwined with racist fantasies
just like those that pushed George Washington north. The IWW is making
headlines again, organizing the country’s first fast food unions in Portland.
There’s a Burgerville by the highway here – when will the Wobblies return to
Centralia?
I was hardly in the right nostalgic mindset when I wandered
into the mazelike antiques mall in the basement of the Centralia Square building,
and I didn’t end up buying anything. (I’ll admit I was briefly tempted by an
array of Olympia Brewing-branded belt buckles.) Instead, as I walked back to my
car, I ducked into one of the used bookstores on Tower.
It was midmorning on a workday, and the town had been quiet
apart from the occasional roar of freight trains. Now I walked into a
conversation. As I browsed, the proprietor was deep in gossipy conversation
with an older man, obviously a regular. “Stick around for a game of checkers?”
he suggested, but the customer’s wife needed him back home to move some
furniture. I apologized for interrupting them with my purchase.
“Are you from around here, or just passing through?” asked
the bookseller asked as he rung me up. I explained that I lived in Seattle these
days but was on my way back to Portland to visit friends. I’d never been here,
so I thought I’d pull off the highway and have a look around.
“Well, it is the midpoint,” he said with a smile.
