Olympia Time

A couple of notes before we get to the actual blog post:

1. One of the first times I realized history wasn’t fixed came when I was a reporter at the Montesano Vidette. I was in my early 20s, still taking weekend classes at Evergreen. The Vidette was caught between eras—part hands-on production, part digital. We’d print our computer-written stories in column width, then cut and paste them onto pages before sending them off to the printer in Shelton. Just a few feet from our front door sat a century of bound newspaper editions. Every week, a handful of historians, history buffs, and family genealogists came by with spiral-bound notebooks and pencils to take notes from those oversized volumes.

One afternoon, an older woman arrived with an overstuffed backpack. She’d taken the bus up from Lewis County, connecting through Olympia. I was killing time before heading to the Elma City Council meeting when I noticed she had several volumes open, covering 1918 through 1923. She was searching for traces of a relative involved in the Centralia Massacre, back when Wobblies clashed with the American Legion.

What stuck with me most, though, was seeing her again later that night in Elma. Before the council meeting began, she approached the city clerk to ask if she could examine city records. She was catching the last bus out of Grays Harbor but had seen the city hall lights on and decided to stop. The clerk said no, and the police chief—who always attended council meetings, handed her a coupon for a hotel room and the bus out in the morning.

Here was someone, retired, without the money to drive, so convinced the official story of American Legionnaires bravely fending off Wobbly attackers was wrong that she hiked and bused her way to dig through the record. The Centralia Massacre is still debated today. If you don’t know the ins and outs, you can still follow along here. You don’t need to be a historian. But the story is fascinating. And, much like the legend of Marcus Whitman, the “official” tale is a heroic cover over a much deeper, messier truth about our region.

2. For obvious reasons, I’ve also been thinking about the opening stanza of Yeats’ The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

There are endless reflections to draw from this poem, most circling back to the idea that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Yeats had just witnessed the devastation of the Great War and the collapse of centuries of British rule in Ireland. An old order (unjust though it was) was giving way to violent disorder. His imagery: paths spinning away from the center, blood in the water, a beast slouching toward Bethlehem, captures both dread and inevitability. History was turning, but not toward salvation.

Centralias

There are a lot of Centralias in the United States. Twelve, as best I can tell. Fargo, North Dakota, used to be a Centralia, but changed its name. If you trace five of these Centralias (Missouri, Oklahoma, Washington, Illinois, and Pennsylvania), you can run a bloody finger across American history since the Civil War.

1864: Centralia, Missouri

Not at the forefront of the campaigns in Virginia or the Mississippi Delta, Centralia, Missouri, was caught in the deeper, revenge-fueled violence that marked the darker history of the Civil War. On September 27, 1864, Confederate guerrillas led by William “Bloody Bill” Anderson (joined by a young Jesse James) launched the Centralia Massacre. They boarded a train, separated 24 Union soldiers on leave, and executed them. It did not stop there. The guerrillas looted the town, torched the train, and set fire to the depot.

The Missouri front of the war was an irregular backwater, but it carried the legacy of Bleeding Kansas, and its violence was no less savage.

Later that same day, a Union force of 146 inexperienced mounted infantry was sent to intercept Anderson’s men. The clash became the Battle of Centralia. But if not for the earlier massacre, this too might have been called a massacre. The Union troops were severely outmatched and overrun. Anderson’s fighters killed 123 soldiers, nearly annihilating the detachment. By the end of the day, 147 Union casualties had marked Centralia as a site of wartime horror. Observers at the time called it an “inhuman slaughter” and one of the “chief barbarisms of the war.”

The massacre was not an isolated event but part of the escalating cycle of frontier violence that began with Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s. Confederate guerrillas sought revenge against federal forces who had occupied the Missouri-Kansas borderlands. Union responses were just as brutal: Brigadier General Clinton B. Fisk suggested “depopulation and devastation” in retribution, citing earlier expulsions of border residents under General Ewing’s orders. The violence was reciprocal, entrenched, and unrelenting.

1901: Centralia, Oklahoma

After the Civil War came emancipation, Reconstruction, and then its collapse. Jim Crow laws and sundown towns spread across the nation, systems of racial control maintained by violence, and sometimes resisted by violence.

That resistance flared in Centralia, Oklahoma, in October 1901.

White residents tried to drive Black families out of town one night. A group of white men attacked the home of a Black resident, Whitmitre, firing into the roof and forcing his family to flee into the dark.

In response, Black townspeople armed themselves. Shots rang out along the streets, and white residents barricaded themselves inside their homes. In the chaos, a white woman was shot. The Black residents’ message was clear: they would not be driven out. Federal authorities later arrived and suppressed the uprising, arresting one Black man for shooting the woman.

Centralia was not the only place where white people forcibly removed residents based on race. But it is one of the few where people of color stood up and fought back.

1919: Centralia, Washington

This is the one most people around here know.

On November 11, 1919, a parade to celebrate the end of World War I, a year before, erupted into bloodshed. The Centralia Massacre (sometimes called the Centralia Conspiracy, Riot, or Tragedy) pitted the American Legion against the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”).

The massacre grew out of long-standing tensions between the Wobblies and a coalition of local business owners, the American Legion, and government officials. The IWW pushed for all workers to unite as a class, take control of production, and challenge the capitalist system. They often used “direct action” tactics like strikes and public speeches to make their point. Their anti-war stance during World War I only made matters worse. Many locals saw them as unpatriotic, even traitorous.

The 1919 killings were an escalation of years of attacks by the anti-IWW coalition. In 1914, IWW members looking for food were marched out of town. In 1917, they were evicted from their union hall. And in 1918, a group of businessmen raided the hall during a Red Cross parade, beating members and dumping them outside town.

When the shooting ended, six were dead: four Legionnaires, one Wobbly, and a deputy sheriff. The Wobbly, Wesley Everest, was captured, jailed, and later lynched by a vigilante mob. Some IWW members were convicted in the aftermath, but no one was charged in Everest’s killing or for the assault on the union hall.

1947: Centralia, Illinois

The bosses had been warned, but the mine blew up anyway.

On March 25, 1947, an explosion tore through Centralia Mine Number 5. Coal dust ignited, killing 111 miners.

The hazards were known long before. State and federal inspectors, union officials, and safety officers had warned of the coal dust buildup and unsafe blasting practices. Management ignored the warnings. At one point, they even admitted to unsafe practices. Still, nothing changed. The result was a catastrophe.

Whenever you hear about regulation, safety rules, and the economy, you should think back to Centralia, Illinois. This was a time when labor unions wielded more power than today, yet workplace safety rules were ignored enough that killing 111 men barely registered beyond becoming the fifth-worst workplace catastrophe since 1940.

1962: Centralia, Pennsylvania

Rather than destroying 100 miners in an instant, this Centralia has been erased slowly, in smoke and fire.

At least, because authorities could foresee the danger, they eventually stepped in, after allowing the even bigger wrong to happen.

Since 1962, an underground coal seam fire has burned beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania. Most believe it started when a landfill fire spread into abandoned mines. The consequences have been terrifying.

In 1979, a gas station owner discovered his underground fuel tanks had reached 172°F. In 1981, a 12-year-old boy fell into a 150-foot sinkhole in his backyard—saved only by clutching a tree root. Carbon monoxide seeped through the ground.

The fire led to a slow evacuation. In 1983, Congress gave $42 million for relocation. More than 500 buildings were demolished. In 1992, the state seized remaining properties through eminent domain. The town lost its ZIP code in 2002. By 2020, only five residents remained, having won the right to stay for life. Today, Centralia is little more than cracked roads, weeds, and warning signs of fire and poison gas.

Centralias

The center did not hold in Missouri, where border wars became slaughter in the Civil War. It did not hold in Oklahoma, where white supremacy cracked and Black resistance burned. It did not hold in Illinois, where profit outweighed miners’ lives. It did not hold in Pennsylvania, where the earth itself betrayed its settlers, burning from below.

And so it goes: America is a lone Douglas fir in a wind storm, fragile and furious. Stability is never given; it is enforced, at someone else’s expense, until it snaps.

Order, a center, is forced by guerrillas, mobs, bosses, and bureaucrats. All tools of power that maintain control until they go too far, and tragedy ensues.

The Centralias are not exceptions. You could grab more city names out of a bag and find a host of similar sundown town violence, industrial accidents, and labor wars. Centralias are warnings.

Things fall apart. The Centralias cannot hold. And the little anarchies are loosed.

But in the end, most of these Centralias still exist. Missouri is still on the map. Washington and Illinois are scarred by history, but still there. Even the Centralia that was wiped off the face of Pennsylvania was not erased by indifference but met, however imperfectly, with responsibility and relocation. Yeats’ Ireland, torn by violence, moved on, even now edging toward reunification. And Europe, as it leans towards continental war again, has also seen long stretches of peace and reunification. History is not only a blood-dimmed tide. It carries moments of rebuilding, of reconciliation, of quiet endurance. The fire does not burn forever, and the center, however fragile, can be rebuilt.

In 1986, thousands of timber workers along the Washington coast went on strike. In the middle of the walkout, seven workers (occasionally joined by their union brothers and families) walked more than a hundred miles to Olympia.

They marched to demand that Governor Booth Gardner, scion of the very timber corporation they were striking against, intervene on their behalf.

The “Save Our Communities March” culminated in a noon rally on the Capitol Campus on Friday, July 25, 1986, attended by roughly 1,500 striking Weyerhaeuser workers and their supporters.

Gardner didn’t intervene. And the workers eventually had to surrender. During a short speech at the rally, the governor was booed and heckled as he urged workers to accept change in the industry if they wanted it to survive.

Gardner talked in the same language as timber company bosses: that competition from the American Sound and Canadian mills made the heavily union communities in the Pacific Northwest hard to pay for.

Weyerhaeuser was demanding a $6 per hour average wage and benefit concession. In return, the company offered a profit-sharing plan. They promised workers a share of the profits, but only if their specific mill performed well. The problem with that was that you needed a job to share in the profits.

Union members suspected the company was trying to claw back hard-won gains, especially given that some mills had remained profitable. A week before the rally, the strike had spread to 6,200 Weyerhaeuser workers across the Northwest.

But, the march on Olympia happened against a backdrop of unraveling solidarity, as the company began reopening mills using salaried employees and union workers who crossed picket lines. This led to scattered confrontations: rock-throwing, damaged vehicles, but the incidents were isolated.

So by that Friday, 1,000 had crossed the line, and 1,500 were shouting at the governor.

And three days later, 11 Weyerhaeuser plants were back in operation with a combined workforce of 1,600 union and non-union employees. The unions lost.

They had initially sought a wage increase and better benefits. But when the 52-day strike ended on August 18, 1986 when union members ratified a new contract that included both wage and benefit reductions and a profit-sharing plan to partially offset the losses.

Looming over the entire strike was Weyerhaeuser’s ongoing push to replace human labor with automation. In the seven years leading up to the strike, timber jobs in Oregon dropped 15 percent, even though lumber output increased. The workers knew what was coming. The spotted owl hadn’t even entered the conversation yet. It was always automation.

The workers in Aberdeen and Raymond went back to smaller paychecks and to jobs that were increasingly being done by machines. But at least they had profit-sharing.

Just weeks before the strike, a millworker named Ivan Breider told the Seattle P-I exactly what was going on: “If they got too much profit, they’ll put in new machines… or robots to do more of the jobs. That’s what they’re going to use it for—to eliminate jobs with. The men will never see it.”

He was right.

Ten years after the strike, Weyerhaeuser had cut 10,000 jobs worldwide, 1,400 in Washington alone, without cutting output.

And eight years after the strike, the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted, changing the mix of wood supply to protect endangered species like the spotted owl. But while automation had been erasing jobs steadily for years and unions had slowly capitulated, the dominant narrative became all about the owl.

Automation wasn’t unique to Weyerhaeuser. It was reshaping the entire wood products industry. Labor economists summed it up clearly: “Automation has affected us all.”

But we’ve forgotten the 1986 strike, the “March to Save Our Communities,” and the workers who saw corporate greed and automation as the real threat. We’ve replaced it with a story about a battle between environmentalists and loggers.

That shift in narrative was missed by KUOW in a recent piece about tariffs and the possibility of re-opening Northwest forests for harvest:

“So, why has the timber industry here declined so much?”

Mill manager Aaron Poquette had some answers: increased difficulty harvesting from public lands, the timber wars of the 1980s and ’90s, and wildlife protections like the spotted owl.

“The harvest volumes that come off the national forest right in our backyard are nowhere near what they were in the ’80s and early ’90s,” Poquette said. “We have this huge timber base… but we’re just not taking the harvest.”

He also cited rising labor costs, industry consolidation, and changes in forestland ownership.

What’s missing? The jobs lost to automation.

The story almost gets there:

“Barnes’ career path illustrates how, over time, mill jobs are becoming more highly skilled and valuable. Now, with AI technologies entering the mill, doing things like visually grading the quality of each board, that transition continues.”

But even then, it pivots back to supply.

Why does it matter whether the problem is supply or automation? The slow disappearance of human labor in the timber industry is part of a much larger story. The story of people vs. machines. John Henry vs. the steam drill.

This was the last-gasp strike before automation eliminated jobs, and we blamed it on an owl.

But it’s not just a story about timber workers. It’s also a story about software engineers and artificial intelligence. Microsoft is laying off thousands while leaning into AI. There’s a bone-deep fear that these high-paid, high-skill jobs will go the way of the timber mill, gone in a generation.

A few years after Zoom school hit and laptops became required, kids are now burning their school-issued Chromebooks. And I know Zoom school was the right call at the time. But something is unnerving about requiring a computer to attend school, even as we rip phones from students’ hands in the name of technophobia.

This is also a lesson about our humanity. No matter how far we go, we are still us.

In the same way, we now call for walkable neighborhoods because we’ve realized that building around cars took something from us.

Technology isn’t the enemy. Humanity is the friend.

The Luddites didn’t smash looms because they hated machines; they did it because they hated the bosses who used those machines to devalue their labor. They weren’t anti-tech; they were pro-dignity. The looms were cheaper than people, and the bosses did the math.

The same math has come for loggers. It’s coming for coders.

In a sweeping essay on AI policy, Matt Stoller points to this exact dynamic.

There is in fact a common habit of powerful monopolists choosing to point out a supposedly neutral larger-than-life force, such as ‘technology’ or ‘the future’ or ‘disruption’ or ‘globalization’ to argue that they are not responsible for the anti-social policies enabling their market power. For instance, in 2013, there were a lot of complaints about Amazon avoiding sales taxes and engaging in predatory behavior around book pricing. How did Jeff Bezos answer this charge? “Amazon is not happening to book selling,” he said, “the future is happening to book selling.” I see a lot of similarities between that political language and the AI discourse.

That language of inevitability, of shrugging responsibility that timber companies used against unions as competition from the south, from Canada, from overseas mills, is the same language we now hear in AI discourse.

And it’s why the marchers who reached Olympia 39 years ago still matter. They stood on the Capitol steps shouting for union support, even as scabs crossed picket lines and machines took their jobs. They came to save their communities.

But you can’t drive through Aberdeen today and say their community was saved.

Wendell Berry, in his essay “Conserving Forest Communities,” lays it out in practical terms. Two draft loggers, using horses and old-style skidders, logged a section of forest over two months. A single man in a modern tractor could have done it in a day. Both methods were profitable. But only one employed more people, caused less environmental damage, and strengthened the community.

The timber company and the manufacturer would answer on the basis of purely economic efficiency: the need to produce the greatest volume… in the shortest time. The community, on the contrary and just as much as a matter of self-interest might reasonably prefer the way of working that employed the most people for the longest time and did the least damage to the forest and the soil… From the point of view of the community, it is not an improvement when the number of employed workers is reduced by the introduction of labor-saving machinery.

Stoller points to an essay by Bharat Ramamurti, Zoe Jacobs, and Diego Haro, who argue that our future lies in the power of those people on the Capitol steps in 1986.

AI shouldn’t mean handing over our livelihoods to algorithms or letting billion-dollar corporations decide, unchecked, whose jobs survive. They’ve already been doing that for decades.

We need policies that give workers a voice, not after the layoffs, but before a single AI system is installed. From stronger unions to new models of industry-wide bargaining, we must make sure that the people who do the work get to help decide how the work is done.

Empowering workers to shape the future isn’t just fair. It’s the only way this leap forward becomes something that serves the many, not the few.