Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 1 of 175)

Move fast, break things: The life and times of Washington’s first black, female prosecutor

February 14, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

In the history of Washington state politics, some figures are remembered for their scandals, and others are remembered for their longevity. Then there is Bernardean Broadous.

In 1994, Broadous did not just win an election. She shattered a glass ceiling that had remained untouched since Washington State was founded. She was the first Black woman elected to a county office in the history of Washington, and the first African American to hold an executive county position in Thurston County.

Today, her tenure is largely a footnote. It is often treated as a failed experiment in management. Meanwhile, the man who replaced her, Edward Holm, oversaw an office that cost taxpayers millions of dollars because of his documented behavior. Looking closely at the years between 1994 and 2002 in Thurston County reveals a stark hypocrisy. We see a woman of color judged by the noise of change she was trying to force, while her white male successor was given a pass for actual, adjudicated damage to the public.

The 1994 campaign for Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney was a masterclass in grassroots disruption. Broadous was a Republican with only three years of legal experience. She ran against John Bumford, a veteran Democrat who was the hand-picked successor of the retiring 20-year incumbent, Patrick Sutherland.

On paper, Broadous was a long shot. Bumford had fifteen years in the office and the public endorsement of 26 of the 28 deputy prosecutors in the department. The institutional resistance was immediate. Before the first ballot was cast, her future subordinates called her incompetent in the local press. Bumford focused his campaign on experience. Broadous flipped that argument. She did not say she had more years in a courtroom. She said those years were spent perfecting a broken status quo. She accused the office of being too quick to settle cases and claimed that, as a deputy, cases were taken away from her when she refused to reduce charges.

Broadous used a specialized team of volunteers to bridge the funding gap. Bumford outraised her two-to-one, with the vast majority of his funds coming from his own pocket. Her campaign used a fleet of painted vans to counter the expensive bus advertisements of her opponent. They filmed Broadous in living rooms answering questions to show her forthright nature. This was a sophisticated data operation, too. Her team analyzed precinct numbers to find winnable areas in the suburbs. They timed their mailers to hit exactly when ballots arrived. This strategy worked.

Broadous pulled off a stunning upset and won by 867 votes. And, in the broader sweep of history here, it was the last stand for Republican institutional power in Thurston County before it became a Democratic stronghold. 1994 was the last high-water mark for Republicans in Washington State and Thurston County, before falling reliably into today’s pattern.

Broadous entered office in 1995 with a mandate for change. She inherited an office that had functioned under one man for two decades. She brought a focus on accountability and efficiency. Her most significant achievement was the Juvenile Diversion Reform. Before Broadous, the juvenile system was slow and lacked direction. She started a program that required offenders to face sanctions or charges within 12 days of an arrest. She used Community Accountability Boards made of local volunteers to determine punishments. This program resulted in a 50 percent reduction in felony recidivism. Broadous was also a founding architect of the Thurston County Drug Court. She pushed for a system that offered non-violent offenders treatment and testing as an alternative to jail. She believed the message of the law was lost if punishment was not swift and sure.

Just looking at the raw numbers, prosecutions in Thurston County went from around 1,000 each year before Broadous to nearly double that during her tenure.

However, we cannot ignore that these reforms created internal conflict. Broadous was a demanding manager. She restricted plea bargains to prevent deal shopping. This stripped deputy prosecutors of their autonomy. To Broadous, this was accountability. To her staff, it was a lack of trust.

In her first 19 months, 18 deputy prosecutors left the office. This high turnover became the main criticism against her. Critics claimed the remaining staff were overworked. Defense attorneys complained that her refusal to negotiate was clogging the court system. Broadous did not back down.

By 1998, Ed Holm saw the turnover in the office as a political weapon. He campaigned on a platform of restoring stability. The narrative against Broadous was cemented by two legal actions filed just weeks before the primary election. In July 1998, a former employee named Betty Benefiel filed a lawsuit alleging Broadous treated her unfairly. In August 1998, a secretary named Sheila Kirby filed a claim for emotional distress. Broadous called these attacks politically motivated. The timing was certainly suspicious, but the damage was done. Holm used the lawsuits to argue that Broadous could not lead. Broadous lost the election and received less than 40 percent of the vote.

Holm was hailed as a stabilizer.

But the stability he promised was a myth. By 2001, three female deputy prosecutors sued Holm and his management team for sexual discrimination and a hostile work environment.

The details revealed in the Holm trial were far worse than anything alleged against Broadous. The plaintiffs alleged that women were given lower pay and less desirable assignments. They described the office as a boys’ club. The lawsuit detailed inappropriate sexual comments and lewd jokes. The jury eventually found that Holm and his office retaliated against the women after they complained about the discrimination. In 2006, a jury ruled in favor of the women. They found that the county had discriminated against them based on their gender. They also found that the office had created a hostile work environment.

The most telling part of this story is the final cost to the public. The lawsuits against Broadous that dominated the news in 1998 went nowhere. They stayed in the court system for four years. In 2002, after Broadous was out of office and Holm himself decided not to run again, the parties signed an agreement to drop the cases. No money was paid to the plaintiffs. No wrongdoing was ever proven. The cost to the taxpayers for these lawsuits was zero dollars. These claims were dismissed with prejudice, meaning they could never be brought again.

Compare that to the Ed Holm settlement. The jury awarded the three women $1.52 million for the discrimination and retaliation they endured. The judge then added $1.45 million in attorney fees. By the time the case was fully settled and the appeals were finished in 2011, the total cost reached nearly $6 million. When you weigh the two administrations, the Broadous years were characterized by administrative friction and turnover that cost the public nothing in court. The Holm years were characterized by systemic misconduct that left the county with a multi-million dollar bill.

The historical memory of Thurston County should take another at Bernardean Broadous. She was a historic first who tried to modernize a stagnant system. She was a Black woman who walked into a white male-dominated field and demanded high standards. She was punished for it. We remember her for the turnover and the noise of lawsuits that ended in nothing.

The Science and Art Departments at Olympia High School in 1960. All or the other departments were white too.

The Small Power of Photos, the Large Power of Enforcement

February 7, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

In 1961, if you wanted to teach at Olympia High School, you had to show the district exactly what you looked like. Before anyone looked at your degree or your references, they looked at your face. This wasn’t just about record-keeping. This was an era when racial discrimination was common in Olympia but rarely admitted in public. A mandatory headshot was an incredibly effective gatekeeping tool. It allowed the district to maintain a white faculty without ever having to say a word about race out loud.

The State Board Against Discrimination eventually stepped in and told the Olympia School District to stop. The district didn’t just disagree. They took the board to court to fight for their right to require those photos. This legal battle lasted nearly two years. The board argued that a photograph was a graphic specification of an applicant’s race. They said it was just as revealing as requiring applicants to write down their race on the form. Their lawyers pointed out that photographs mainly provide information about physical beauty. Unless beauty was a requirement for teaching, they argued, the policy was a direct violation of state law.

Superintendent Rolland Upton led the defense for the school district. He claimed the photos were just for reference. He said the images helped officials judge professional dignity and personal appearance. The district’s lawyers even argued that because an in-person interview would reveal race anyway, the photo wasn’t the primary tool for discrimination.

That argument is hard to take seriously. A photo allows a recruiter to toss an application into the trash immediately. It ensures that a minority applicant never even gets the chance to prove themselves in an interview.

Upton’s defense feels hollow when you look at the rest of Olympia’s history. Discrimination wasn’t an accident here. It was built into the system. Ten years before this court case, racially restrictive covenants were still being filed in Thurston County. These were documents that barred non-white people from owning certain homes. They were filed years after the Supreme Court ruled they couldn’t be enforced.

We know these barriers were real because local historians like Thelma Jackson documented them. In her book, Blacks in Thurston County, Washington: A History, she explains how Black residents were treated when they arrived. Real estate agents would simply, without explanation or excuse, refuse to show them homes in specific neighborhoods. It is hard to believe that a school district in that same environment would magically ignore the race of an applicant. Given what we know about Olympia in the 1960s, it’s clear the photos acted as a silent filter.

Research since then backs up what the board suspected back then. We know that visual cues trigger deep biases. When Upton talked about professional dignity, he was likely using a code word. Recruiters often equate professional looks with white beauty standards. This makes people of color seem less capable before they even speak. The board was right to call the photo a graphic specification. A headshot is the strongest signal of race an applicant can provide.

There’s even a technical side to this exclusion. Historically, color film was calibrated using Shirley Cards. These cards featured white models and were used to set the color balance for developing photos. Because the technology was designed for white skin, photos of Black people often lacked detail and texture. Researchers believe this helped promote bias by making minority faces look less human or expressive in print.

This wasn’t just about aesthetics. It was about economics. By using these look policies, the district could cultivate an all-white workforce. This was segregation disguised as a preference for appearance. The consequences were real. Even today, studies on sites like LinkedIn show that Black profiles get fewer responses. By mandating photos in 1961, the Olympia School District put Black educators at an immediate disadvantage. This led to lost careers and long-term wage gaps.

The legal side of the story is just as messy. The local Thurston County judge, Charles T. Wright, originally sided with the school district. He ruled that the board had gone too far. He didn’t think a simple request for a photo proved an intent to discriminate. It was a very narrow way of looking at the law. It ignored how systemic racism actually works. The board appealed to the State Supreme Court. This time, they won. The high court issued a unanimous decision. They ruled that under the specific laws of that time, orders issued by the board against government agencies were not subject to judicial review.

This was a huge win for the commission. It re-established their power to stamp out discriminatory practices in city governments and school districts without getting stuck in long court battles. When the board was first created in 1949, it was weak and underfunded. It didn’t have much power to change things. But by the 1960s, groups like the Congress of Racial Equality were putting on pressure. The state legislature eventually expanded the board’s reach. They started looking at discrimination in housing and public spaces, too.

By 1970, the agency had grown into a much more visible force. It eventually became the Washington State Human Rights Commission. Cases like the one in Olympia fueled this growth. The state had to decide whether to protect the preferences of white officials or the civil rights of its citizens.

Because of the Supreme Court ruling, the ban on photos was upheld. Superintendent Upton had to announce that the district would change its forms. They finally removed the space for the photograph. It was a clear victory. But the people who lost weren’t finished. Some board members suggested they should change the law so they could appeal these decisions in the future.

That’s exactly what happened five years later. In 1971, the legislature rewrote the law. They gave the commission its new name, the Washington State Human Rights Commission. But they also gave other public agencies the right to appeal the board’s decisions. The board had won the battle over the photos, but the legislature had quietly cancelled the war. School boards and city councils found a way to tie the commission’s hands again.

Institutional racism doesn’t need a loud voice. It can work through small rules and administrative details. The Olympia School District didn’t have to say they were discriminating. They just had to say they wanted to see who was applying. But in 1961, seeing was a form of sorting.

Progress also isn’t a straight line. Every time a barrier is removed, the system can find a quieter way to rebuild it.

This is why the work of people like Thelma Jackson is so important, because it keeps these stories alive. It prevents institutions from rewriting their own history. The 1961 photo case was an early version of the debates we still have today about bias in hiring, banking, policing, and our everyday practices.

This history also shows how far and deep the work to reverse the damage we’ve done in our communities goes. It reminds us that equity isn’t just about changing a form or a policy. It requires a constant, active commitment to tearing down the walls that were built to be invisible.

The Power of Nightmares but Dreaming of Something Better

January 31, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

The streets were under a state of siege. They were gripped by a level of civic breakdown that feels ancient in its brutality.

A powerful media figure styled himself as a guardian of law and order. He spent months radicalizing the public against a perceived foreign threat. Through his writing and speeches, he cast social conflict as an invasion and dissent as subversion.

This campaign led to the formation of a heavily armed force that ignored the courts and civic institutions. In organized raids, its members rounded up hundreds of people they didn’t like. They beat them with clubs. They forced them at gunpoint out of town and banished them from the places where they lived and worked.

The air was thick with talk of Americanism versus treason. The local press framed these purges as a necessary cleansing of the community.

This wasn’t Minneapolis or Chicago in 2026. This was Hoquiam in 1912.

The events of the Grays Harbor County War started a political firestorm. It shattered local politics and created the framework for the immigration system we’re still fighting over today. What happened on the banks of the Hoquiam River wasn’t a weird one-off event. It was a prototype.

Albert Johnson was the central figure. He was a newspaper editor who later carried this model of vigilante justice to Congress. The workers he targeted were immigrants tied to the Industrial Workers of the World. Like the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Citizens’ Committee that terrorized the IWW was made up of local businessmen. These men believed they could restore order with ax handles and rifles. This conflict was a rehearsal for the nationalistic energy that became the Immigration Act of 1924. Our technology is different now, but the blueprint is the same. People exploit local unrest, turn economic stress into a cultural threat, and use that panic to justify national fear.

Grays Harbor was the lumber capital of the world. Its wealth came from the hard work of Finns, Greeks, and Slavs. These immigrant workers lived in dirty camps and worked ten-hour days in dangerous mills. In late 1911 and early 1912, the IWW organized them. They started with free speech fights and ended with a massive strike in March 1912. The mills stopped. The business elite panicked.

Johnson was the editor of The Daily Washingtonian. He became their main voice. He didn’t just write columns. He used his paper to help lead the Citizens’ Committee. This was a vigilante group made up of people who saw themselves as “respectable.” They ignored the police and did whatever they wanted. They raided union halls and beat strikers. By May 1912, they crushed the strike. Workers were loaded onto trains at gunpoint and told to never come back. Johnson told the public this wasn’t about wages. He said it was about protecting America from foreign anarchy.

That story became the foundation of his career. He was elected to Congress in November 1912. He brought another paper, the Home Defender, to D.C. to keep the fight going. Over the next decade, he turned the logic of Grays Harbor into federal law. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which added literacy tests. This was just the start.

By 1919, Johnson was the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He wanted his ideas to look official. He hired a eugenicist named Harry Laughlin to be his expert. The results were laws that narrowed who was allowed to be American. In 1921, he wrote the Emergency Quota Act. In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act finished the job. It used the 1890 census to decide who could enter. This was a trick to exclude the same Southern and Eastern Europeans Johnson fought in Washington. When President Coolidge signed it, Johnson called it a second Declaration of Independence.

He turned mob violence into a government machine. Things like deportation and visas weren’t acts of a crowd anymore. They were part of a permanent system.

Alternative History of Hoquiam

But I’m not writing today to just tell you what happened in Hoquiam was inevitable. Right now, we’re trying to find a way out. So, let’s imagine a world where Johnson didn’t succeed.

But what if this didn’t happen? It’s useful to look at how history could have gone differently. We’ve seen that history isn’t always a straight line. There’s a version of this where the “Red Coast” didn’t just resist but built a bridge between different groups. Imagine if the 1912 strike ended with a coalition of workers and farmers. In this version, the local middle class is disgusted by the violence. They decide that you can’t have law and order if you’re breaking the law to get it. Johnson’s paper is sued for libel. He loses his money and his reputation before he ever gets to D.C.

The Washington State Grange helped make this possible. They were a powerful group of farmers who cared about the democratic process. They hated the vigilantism of the Citizens’ Committee. They saw the deportations as a threat to everyone’s civil liberties. The Grange condemned the business elite. They put their support behind local leaders who stood against the violence. This gave the middle class the cover they needed to speak up. It broke the power of the anti-labor group and made room for a new Labor Defense League.

In this timeline, Stanton Warburton, a progressive Republican, wins the 1912 election instead of Johnson. He beats him by speaking out against the ax handle tactics. Because Warburton keeps his seat, the path to the 1924 Act is severed. Instead of racist quotas, we get the 1928 Integration Act. It creates a federal office to help new workers. By 1930, 18% of the population is foreign born. These people become a huge group of customers that helps the economy stay stable during the Depression. American identity becomes about what you contribute rather than where your parents were from.

The labor movement wins by changing what it means to be American. They argue that including people is the best way to stop exploitation. The Labor Defense League teaches English and civics while they organize. They say an immigrant with a union card is a better American than a man with a club.

Without Johnson, eugenics would never have become a part of our policy. The leaders of the immigration committee are progressives who care about the economy, not “purity.” This focus on solidarity changes everything. Unions and farmers work together. Farm owners in the fruit regions agree to fair wages and housing in exchange for a stable workforce. They create a direct path to citizenship.

If that had happened, our politics today would be different. We wouldn’t be obsessed with demographics or cultural panic. We’d talk about economic solidarity instead. We wouldn’t hear much about “replacement” or “dilution.” We’d focus on building unions and protecting workers. This would stop the race to the bottom that makes people hate immigration.

Our experts would change too. We wouldn’t listen to people who scream about border crises. We’d listen to people who study how to help newcomers join the community. Success would be measured by how fast people pay taxes and join the workforce.

Johnson’s power came from turning local fights into a national panic. We still see this. A fight in a city or a border dispute becomes an existential crisis. The lesson of this alternate history is that local resistance matters. If Hoquiam had said no to Johnson in 1912, we might have a more open democracy today.

The 1924 Act is still with us because it made immigration a matter of crime and race. Before Johnson, “illegal aliens” weren’t really a thing in our laws. He built the world of border patrols and caps. Even after the overtly racist parts were removed in 1965, the structure stayed. Johnson didn’t just win a fight in a small town. He changed the whole conversation. He made us ask if people should be here at all instead of asking how to welcome them. That choice still has us stuck today.

The Current Counterfactual

We can see the emotional reality of this counterfactual in modern Pacific County. It sits right next to Grays Harbor. In 2017, the area was shaken when ICE agents detained Mario Rodriguez at the post office in Long Beach. Mario wasn’t a stranger. He’d lived on the peninsula for twelve years. He worked as a bilingual teaching aide in the local schools. He was a neighbor, a volunteer, and a friend. When he was taken, the reaction from the local white community was not what you might expect. Many of these people had voted for the very policies that led to his arrest, but they weren’t happy. They were shocked.

Even the local police chief, Flint Wright, was rattled. He had supported a tougher border, but he spoke up for Mario. He called him a pro-law enforcement guy. He said anyone would want him as a neighbor. This reaction shows that when abstract talk about “illegal aliens” meets a real human being, the old logic falls apart. The people of Pacific County didn’t see an invader. They saw a hole left in their neighborhood. They formed a support group that eventually became a nonprofit. They fought for their neighbor.

This local pushback is today’s proof that Johnson’s vision was never inevitable. It shows that even in the conservative timber and fishing towns of Southwest Washington, people can choose their neighbors over a club. The ghost of 1924 is still in the machine, but stories like Mario’s remind us that we can choose a different path. We don’t have to live in the reality Albert Johnson built. We’ve seen a glimpse of something else. It’s much closer than we think.

1949 and the accidental, mistaken transformation of Olympia

January 24, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 4 Comments

The layout of downtown Olympia is burned into my brain. It just seems inherent to the space that coming down from the Upper East Side, both State and 4th are one-way. Especially coming from my neighborhood, this doesn’t always make 4th and State the fastest way across town. But it does feel like it’s always been this way, that when we created this part of town, the original layout was two paired one-way streets.

But that’s not actually true. Before the late 40s, downtown was just a normal grid. You could go both ways on every street.

The switch to one-way streets wasn’t some long-planned city project either. It was an accident caused by a massive earthquake in 1949. What started as a quick fix to get around piles of fallen bricks turned into a permanent setup. Then the state highway department saw an opening to turn our local streets into a highway for commuters, and they took it. It’s a classic case of prioritizing fast cars over a walkable neighborhood.

Before 1949, Olympia’s downtown felt a lot tighter and more connected. We didn’t have all these massive parking lots everywhere. Instead, it was just row after row of actual buildings. This was also when the residential neighborhoods surrounding downtown were interconnected using similar grid patterns, before growth had grown beyond Division on the west and Boulevard on the east.

When a street goes both ways, twice as many people see a storefront. You aren’t “eclipsed” by the direction of traffic. But after WWII, engineers became obsessed with “throughput.” They stopped thinking about downtown as a place to be and started seeing it as a hurdle to drive through. They wanted to move the tides of cars as fast as possible. The old two-way grid was standing in their way, but it took a disaster to finally break it.

The real turning point happened on April 13, 1949. It was just before noon when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit. It was the biggest one the region had seen all century. Two people died, and the damage was immense. Eleven buildings were so damaged that they had to be boarded up immediately.

4th Avenue and State Street were a mess. To keep things moving while crews cleaned up the rubble, the city made a quick call: make them one-way. It was supposed to be a temporary fix to manage the chaos. But the streets never went back to the way they were. The earthquake gave engineers the perfect excuse to push a one-way vision that had been bubbling under the surface for years.

By late October, downtown business owners were joining forces to ask for a return to the pre-April alignment downtown. “Promises were made to return to two-way traffic as soon as the emergency was relieved,” said a downtown druggist and head of a business committee.

This is where the State Highway Department really left its mark. As the city debated whether to keep the temporary measure through the fall of 1949, the state didn’t just suggest keeping the one-way streets; they basically mandated it. They decided to fold 4th and State into the state highway system. 4th Avenue became the southbound lanes for the Pacific Highway, and State Avenue took the northbound traffic.

The legislature had passed a law the year before, allowing the Highway Department to take a heavier hand in ensuring state highways efficiently passed traffic. To that end, the highway department studied the issue of now one-way streets in Olympia and gave the city government two options: stay with one-way or lose all the parking along 4th and State.

By doing this, the state prioritized regional travel over the people actually living in Olympia. The main goal was throughput, moving people from the suburbs to their jobs or across the state as fast as possible. Our downtown streets weren’t local roads anymore. They were effectively a highway split in half. Once that highway designation was set in stone, there was no going back. The state had its high-speed corridor, and the city was stuck with the noise and the speed.

Business leaders talked about suing, saying the state was taking too heavy a hand. But no lawsuit followed, and downtown settled into its current pattern. Just less than 10 years later, Interstate 5 bypassed downtown Olympia, but one-way streets stayed.

We’re still paying for that 1949 decision today. On paper, one-way streets move cars fast, but they make life harder for everyone else. Research shows that child pedestrians are 2.5 times more likely to get hurt on one-way streets. It makes sense if you think about it. Drivers get into a highway mindset and stop looking for people.

Looking back, the 1949 earthquake broke the way Olympia functions. We traded a walkable, easy-to-navigate downtown for a system that treats downtown like a bypass. This isn’t even getting into the number of buildings that were torn down in the last 75 years to make way for parking.

I focus a lot of attention on downtown Olympia in this discussion. But it is worth pointing out that most of the mileage for the one-way streets in Olympia goes through formally residential neighborhoods. The city has slowly changed how the blocks are treated around the one-way paired throughfairs, but to me, even if we build denser, mixed-use neighborhoods up the Eastside hill, slower, more people-oriented traffic orientation makes sense as well.

Today, plenty of cities are realizing this was a mistake. They’re converting one-way streets back to two-way streets to lower crime, help local businesses, and stop the constant speeding. It makes you wonder what Olympia would look like if we had just cleared the 1949 debris and stayed the course with our original grid. We might have had a downtown that feels more like a community and less like a race track.

The Whitman Statue Is Our Confederate General Statue. It is Time to Go

January 17, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

For the last year or so, the state has been tied in knots over a very simple question: where should we put the Marcus Whitman statue once it’s removed from its current spot at the Capitol?

Down the hall? Near the Senate dining room? Outside, under cover, fingers crossed it doesn’t get vandalized or fall apart? Maybe leave it where it is and move everything else around it?

Watching this debate unfold has been oddly familiar. Not because the details are the same, but because the pattern is.

We’ve seen this movie before. Just not here.

In the South, communities spent decades arguing about what to do with Confederate statues. Every option was explored except the obvious one. Move it somewhere else. Add context. Put up a plaque. Keep it for history. Avoid controversy. Respect “both sides.” Study it a little longer.

Sound familiar?

Eventually, many of those places had to face the truth. Those statues were never neutral. They weren’t built to teach history. They were built to tell a story about power, race, and who belonged. And once that truth was unavoidable, the only honest option was removal.

Marcus Whitman occupies the same space in Washington’s history.

That may make some people uncomfortable, but discomfort isn’t a reason to avoid clarity.

The Whitman statue was not erected because historians reached a careful consensus about his importance. It was erected because a specific myth needed a physical anchor. The “Whitman Saved Oregon” story wasn’t just wrong. It was useful. It framed white settlement as inevitable, benevolent, and divinely sanctioned. It pushed Native people to the margins. It wrapped colonization in religion and heroism.

That story has been thoroughly debunked. Not recently, but decades ago.

And yet, the statue remains.

That’s why the comparison to Confederate generals matters. In the South, statues of Robert E. Lee and others weren’t really about the Civil War. They were about reinforcing white dominance long after the war ended. Many were erected during periods of backlash against Reconstruction or the civil rights movement. They told a story about who was in charge and whose version of history mattered.

Whitman’s statue does the same thing here. Different region. Different century. Same purpose.

The Whitman myth emerged in the late nineteenth century, decades after his death, at a moment when the Pacific Northwest was trying to explain itself to the rest of the country. The story claimed that Whitman’s 1842 ride east “saved” the region from British control and secured it for American settlement. It cast him as a lone, heroic figure whose actions supposedly determined the fate of the entire region.

That version of events was never supported by serious evidence. The boundary question between the U.S. and Britain was already being negotiated through diplomacy, economics, and military power. Whitman played no decisive role. But the myth stuck because it did important cultural work. It centered white, Christian settlers as the rightful authors of Washington’s history and treated Indigenous nations as background characters in their own homelands.

The myth also served a political purpose. Elevating Whitman, it justified land seizure, missionary violence, and the displacement of tribal members as part of a righteous and inevitable process. It replaced treaty rights and sovereignty with a comforting story about destiny and sacrifice. That framing made colonization feel moral instead of brutal. It made white supremacy feel like history instead of ideology. It is no mistake that we spent decades denying treaty rights and jailing tribal fishermen like Billy Frank Jr., because the story of Whitman made that inevitable.

The Legislature already recognized this, even if it didn’t quite finish the job. In 2021, lawmakers voted to replace Marcus Whitman with Billy Frank Jr. in both the U.S. Capitol and the Washington State Capitol. That decision wasn’t subtle. It was a clear statement about who represents Washington’s values and history.

Billy Frank Jr. fought for treaty rights, environmental protection, and the rule of law. His life and work are grounded in truth, not myth. Elevating him was the right call.

But when it came time to deal with the Whitman statue in Olympia, the Legislature stopped short. No clear instructions.

At a recent joint meeting of the State Capitol Committee and the Capitol Campus Design Advisory Committee, Lt. Governor Denny Heck said the quiet part out loud. The committees, he acknowledged, don’t have guidance from the Legislature on what to do with the Whitman statue here. They’re trying to navigate “sensitivities” without knowing what outcome lawmakers actually want.

So now we’re stuck in the process.

We’re talking about structural engineering studies to see if a four-ton statue can sit in a hallway. We’re debating whether it should be inside or outside. We’re spending time and money figuring out how to preserve a monument the state has already decided should no longer represent us.

Meanwhile, Billy Frank Jr.’s family has made it clear they don’t want his statue sharing space with Whitman. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Pairing them would flatten history into a false equivalence. As if these figures occupy the same moral or historical ground.

They don’t.

What’s striking is how often people say this is all too complicated. It isn’t.

Across the country, far larger and heavier bronze statues have been removed. Robert E. Lee monuments towering multiple stories high came down in Richmond and Charlottesville. A massive Confederate monument in Raleigh was dismantled. One Lee statue was melted down and turned into new public art. Size didn’t stop those communities.

Washington isn’t being asked to do something unprecedented. We’re being asked to catch up.

And here’s the part that often gets lost. Removing the Whitman statue does not erase history. It corrects a distortion. History lives in books, archives, classrooms, and museums. Statues live in civic space. They tell us who we choose to honor.

Right now, the state is bending over backwards to honor a lie because it’s heavy and old and awkward to deal with.

That’s not a good reason.

The Whitman statue is our Confederate general statue. It was built to promote a false, harmful narrative. We know that now. Pretending otherwise just delays the inevitable.

The Legislature should finish what it started: tell the Capitol Committee plainly that the Whitman statue should be removed from the Capitol Campus entirely. Not relocated. Not tucked away. Retired.

Deaccession it. Dismantle it. Repurpose it. But stop pretending it needs a place of honor.

This isn’t about tearing down history. It’s about telling the truth.

The South’s Mythology, the Northwest’s Bureaucracy: How a Single Football Game Defined Two Eras of Exclusion

January 10, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

One of the most compelling ironies of regional history is the fact that 100 years ago, the University of Washington was on the losing side of “the game that changed the South.” While the 1926 Rose Bowl is often remembered in Seattle as an athletic footnote, for the American South, it was a cultural baptism.

By defeating Washington 20-19 on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, Alabama became the first Southern team to achieve national legitimacy, effectively birthing the SEC and a century of collegiate football dominance. For white Southerners, this victory acted as a symbolic “do-over” of the Civil War, allowing them to reclaim a sense of honor and “manhood” through what contemporary writers called the “Spirit of Lee.”

However, to be honest about the nature of this regional pride, this era of Southern football was an exclusively white phenomenon. It was rooted deeply in the “Lost Cause” mythology. While the victory projected an image of modernization and grit to the rest of the country, it was strictly gatekept by Jim Crow laws and “gentleman’s agreements” that barred Black athletes from the field. Football in the South reflected a new, formidable image of Southern strength to the nation while simultaneously protecting a segregated social order at home.

The 1926 Rose Bowl was The Birth of a Nation on the gridiron.

For decades after, Southern football remained a regressive stronghold. Politicians attempted to block integrated matchups as late as 1955, framing them as a social “Armageddon.” Yet, the South’s near-religious obsession with winning eventually turned the sport into a Trojan horse for progress. Coaches eventually realized that to remain national powerhouses and secure lucrative TV contracts, they had to prioritize the “pragmatism of winning” over prejudice. This forced the integration of Southern athletics faster than many other social institutions, simply because the region refused to keep losing to integrated Northern teams.

While the South used the 1926 Rose Bowl to march toward a new identity, the Pacific Northwest was navigating its own version of a white-centric movement. By 1927, the Ku Klux Klan was losing steam in Washington, with an Olympia rally drawing only a fraction (only 12,000) of the crowds seen during the “mega-rallies” of 1924 (above 50,000). It is easy to mistake this decline for a burst of progressivism, but the reality is that the Klan faded because it had already won its primary legislative battles. Most notably, nativists had secured the 1924 Immigration Act, a law spearheaded by Aberdeen’s Rep. Albert Johnson that codified eugenics and racial exclusion into federal policy. In the Northwest, the Klan didn’t need to keep marching because its vision for a white America had already been signed into law.

There is a striking parallel in how both regions disguised their intolerance to make it more palatable. In the South, white supremacy was repackaged as athletic valor; in the Northwest, it was masked as a weekend family outing or “Christian nationalism.” By framing the politics of hate as entertainment, the Klan in Washington made radical exclusion feel remarkably normal. Historians often downplay this era as a fad, but that overlooks how deeply these everyday prejudices were ingrained in our local culture. Just as the Rose Bowl victory elevated an exclusionary Southern identity, the thousands of people who watched the Klan march through Olympia were witnessing a movement that had already successfully institutionalized its goals.

Comparing these two regions reveals the different ways systemic racism settles into a community. The South used football to hide its regression behind a mask of modernization, while the Northwest used a “liberal” shrug to hide how deeply its nativist victories were embedded in the law. We tend to remember the eccentric spectacle of the hoods, but we often forget the boring, bureaucratic laws that those individuals successfully passed. While Southern identity was being forged on the gridiron, the Northwest was allowing its own radical movements to melt back into the community, leaving behind a legacy of exclusion that didn’t require a uniform to persist.

After the 1926 loss, Husky football seemed to become a barometer for the region’s volatile economic pulse rather than a pillar of regional identity. While Alabama fans greeted their team with brass bands, Seattle met the Huskies with a collective shrug. As the region entered the Great Depression, the team’s struggles mirrored the grim reality of the “Boeing Bust” and other economic downturns. Conversely, our Rose Bowl successes in 1960 and 1992 served as the atmospheric backdrop for the Seattle World’s Fair and the global cultural dominance of the early dot-com era. Football in the Northwest never forged our soul the way it did in Dixie.

However, we cannot ignore what was happening beneath the surface during those years of economic struggle. As the prosperity of the 1920s pulled back like a receding tide, it exposed the jagged rocks of prejudice in Cascadia. The Great Depression turned the region into a desperate battleground where the “first to be fired, last to be hired” rule decimated minority communities. In cities like Portland, white workers began displacing Black workers from service jobs, while Mexican and Filipino laborers were targeted for state-sanctioned purges.

This era also saw the quiet institutionalization of the Klan’s nativist mission through federal relief programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps eventually adopted complete segregation, and the Federal Housing Authority’s 1934 rating system officially gave birth to redlining. By drawing lines around neighborhoods with even a single Black resident, the government strangled minority districts like Portland’s Albina District. This wasn’t the loud, “Spirit of Lee” racism found in the South; it was a cold, bureaucratic version that baked inequality into the very geography of our cities.

Looking back at New Year’s Day 1926 in Pasadena, we see two regions attempting to define themselves through very different means. The South used the football field to march away from its past toward a multi-billion-dollar future, turning regional pride into a national powerhouse. In the Northwest, we won our battles for exclusion early and then largely forgot we ever fought them. We watched the Klan march, allowed them to influence our laws, and then permitted them to return to being our neighbors without much further thought.

Ultimately, we have to remember the laws as much as the rallies. If we only focus on the spectacle of the fiery crosses, we miss the long-term impact of redlining and immigration acts. The South’s shield was football, but our shield in the Northwest was often our own indifference. Understanding this history is essential as we continue to debate policies to combat institutional racism today, as it reminds us how easily these systems can persist once they are quietly integrated into the fabric of a community.

Brier Dudley is wrong about the news

January 3, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Brier Dudley’s recent column, “No wonder election results are wacky: Fewer follow the news,” carries significant weight in Washington State. As a leading voice in the movement to fund news organizations, Dudley often frames the boundaries of what policymakers consider possible for future public funding of journalism.

However, his latest diagnosis of our “wacky” election results rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how voters actually behave and where they are finding their signal in the noise.

Dudley’s thesis is that a lack of news consumption leads to “civic illiteracy” and “wacky” results, such as the election of progressive Katie Wilson as mayor of Seattle. But on his way to create a thesis that builds support for local journalism, he ignores the basic calculus of voting. Voting is an opt-in activity.

In political science, this is called “information efficacy”: the belief that you know enough to make a choice. People who truly feel uninformed don’t typically cast “wacky” ballots; they don’t cast ballots at all. This “voter roll-off” is why local turnout is often a fraction of national turnout. If someone shows up to vote for a “neophyte,” it’s rarely because they are operating in a vacuum. It’s because they have consumed media, be it a TikTok breakdown, a thread on X, or a digital endorsement, that gave them the confidence to act.

The Seattle Blind Spot

Also, if Dudley’s thesis were universally true, Seattle would be a strange place to prove it. He laments the decline of newspapers and TV, yet ignores the vibrant, digital-native ecosystem that currently drives Seattle politics.

While the Seattle Times remains a vital institution, it is not the only game in town. The city continues to fund public television; KUOW is a massive, robust newsroom; and then there is The Stranger. Whether one agrees with its politics or not, The Stranger remains a primary driver of city elections. When “neophytes” win, it is often because they were vetted and promoted by these alternative local outlets. By ignoring these players, Dudley isn’t describing a news desert; he’s describing a landscape where daily newspapers no longer hold the only map.

Olympia and Thurston County are a better example of the news desert that Dudley wants to use. The election results here, though, don’t match the results of his thesis. Rather than “wacky,” we tend to elect local leaders who stand in the deep trough of our local version of centrism. This is because the voters who tend to opt in have the time and inclination to do the extra work to research their choices. This is not an argument for less information. A broad and informed public is obviously a good thing for electing good leaders, but ensuring that once they are elected, they do the right thing.

“Social Media” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Dudley, like many, uses “social media” as a catch-all for “no news” or “unfounded opinion.” However, by 2025, telling a researcher that you get your news from social media is a meaningless data point. It doesn’t tell us what you are seeing. Are you following KUOW’s journalists on Mastodon? Are you watching live-streamed City Council clips on YouTube? Or are you reading a post from your neighbor on Nextdoor?

Social media is a delivery mechanism, not a source. The problem isn’t that people are “on social media.” The problem is that we have outsourced our civic square to attention-seeking algorithms.

Credibility is Now Built on Engagement

We cannot recreate the 1995 newsroom. The back-and-forth between media and audience has opened up permanently. Today, credibility is built on engagement, not just clicks to a paywalled article, but the actual work of being present where people are.

However, we must admit the anti-democratic force of current algorithms. Most platforms optimize for outrage because outrage pays more. This is fundamentally different from a newspaper’s old role of setting a shared civic agenda. We don’t just need people to come back to paywalled websites; we need a next way that fixes the digital architecture itself.

The Next Way: Digital Public Spaces

What does a pro-democracy digital space look like? It looks like an algorithm that benefits the community by not stoking outrage, and moderation systems that protect people from harm while inviting debate.

A promising example is Roundabout, a new product from the nonprofit New_Public. Roundabout is designed to revive the civic commons role that local newspapers used to play. Unlike Facebook, it is intentionally built against virality. It organizes local information, events, and shared concerns through structured channels and local stewards who guide the conversation.

Instead of a feed designed to keep you scrolling via conflict, Roundabout creates a digital space meant to help neighbors actually know one another and act together. It prioritizes usefulness over headlines and relationships over “likes.”

Looking back at old newsrooms and tsk-tsking candidates for making social media videos isn’t a strategy for the future. We don’t need to save the press of the past; we need to build a digital commons that treats us like neighbors and citizens rather than data points for an outrage machine.

Seattle Doesn’t Play Itself

December 27, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

For a city obsessed with moviemaking and modern narrative, the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself works as a surprisingly effective local history of Los Angeles and Southern California. Much of how we understand Southern California arrives through the lens of filmmakers.

The core thesis of the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (or at least the one that rings truest to me) is that Los Angeles is constantly captured while being denied the ability to express itself. Even calling Los Angeles “LA” flattens the city, stripping away its complexity. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a typecast actor trying to communicate something real about themselves while trapped in someone else’s script.

My favorite thread in the film is its discussion of mid-century modern Southern California homes, so often repurposed as villainous lairs. Filmmakers turn a distinct and beautiful regional architecture into something cold, cruel, and hostile, warping the meaning of the place itself.

This is the inverse of the problem Seattle (and the broader Pacific Northwest) faces.

Just a note before I go any further: I acknowledge “Seattle” isn’t synonymous with “the Pacific Northwest.” I use it as a stand-in for the urban Northwest, which also includes Portland, parts of Tacoma, Bellingham, and Olympia. There is a broad spectrum of society that is centered deeply in the Seattle experience. There isn’t a moat around the city, so what happens there matters elsewhere. I just wanted to acknowledge that there are missing pieces to what I’m writing about today. Which is sort of the meta-point of the essay anyway.

So, moving on.

Unlike Los Angeles, which plays every city or no city at all, other cities almost always play Seattle. And what this does is it keeps us from approaching our own story. The story necessary for film keeps our own story to one side.

Films set in Seattle routinely shoot somewhere else. Fifty Shades of Grey was filmed in Vancouver, the most common “not Seattle.” More cruelly, The Boys in the Boat was filmed mostly in England, where a historic England market town and a primary school stood in for the Depression-era University of Washington and Seattle.

The first question is whether we can forgive Vancouver as it stands in for Seattle. Both belong to the proto-nation of Cascadia, sibling cities separated by an inconvenient international border. That logic almost works, except Vancouver suffers from its own Los Angeles Plays Itself problem. It plays everyone.

Vancouver has appeared as San Francisco (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), New York (Life or Something Like It), Chicago (I, Robot), Tokyo (Godzilla), and Shanghai (Code 46). It has even played fictional cities like Metropolis (Smallville) and Gotham (Batwoman).

Seattle, by contrast, rarely gets to play itself. When it appears on screen, it matters more as an idea than as a physical place.

Seattle functions cinematically as a concept rather than a geography or community.

The city became shorthand for the foggy shape created when you pull together grunge, Starbucks, and Tech: cultural exports that transformed Seattle into a symbol of urban aspiration and fantasy. As James Lyons explains in Selling Seattle, the city’s rise in film and television accelerated in the early 1990s as it shed its identity as a “rough diamond” lumber town (itself very limiting) and rebranded itself as a center of technology and culture.

One reason filmmakers gravitated toward Seattle was its portrayal as a “safe haven” and “white oasis” for middle-class professionals, especially when contrasted with the media narratives of urban decay and racial unrest that defined Los Angeles in the same era.

Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993) cemented this version of the city: sentimental, romantic, and largely frictionless. Young-ish professionals move through a city unburdened by history, class, or social constraint, living urban-adjacent lives without consequence.

The grunge subculture added a layer of “novel edginess” that appealed to filmmakers without pushing into our actual history or non-white communities. Coffee shops and music venues signaled bohemian credibility while remaining safely contained. Seattle became a metropolitan sanctuary, a cool, mist-covered stage balancing high-tech ambition with rugged natural isolation.

This mythology formed the mental backdrop for stories set in Seattle, but not of Seattle.

Half Steps in Popular Film

The films that do get Seattle and the Pacific Northwest better, if not correct (Singles, Grassroots, The Ring, and the very recent Train Dreams), do so largely because they were filmed here. They often show a different city and region than the friendly, white, urban unicorn of popular imagination.

The Seattle of Singles is jaded and two-faced. In Grassroots, the city turns up its nose at dreamers, favoring politically “serious” projects like light rail over visionary but impractical ideas like the monorail. The Ring forces viewers to confront how dark it gets here (literally and metaphorically) and how much remains unseen. Train Dreams expands the frame beyond the city entirely, emphasizing the overwhelming scale of Pacific Northwest nature, the nature of transitory communities, and asking viewers to sit with uncertainty until the very end.

These films start to reveal what we lose when Seattle doesn’t get to play itself. Nowhere is that loss clearer than in the limitations of Grassroots.

Grassroots feels faithful in spirit, but only if you squint. Adapting Phil Campbell’s memoir, Zioncheck for President, required sanding down something far darker and more unstable. The resulting film is earnest and encouraging, the kind of story that makes local politics feel charming.

Campbell tells the story of Marion Zioncheck, a brilliant, erratic, and tragic 1930s Seattle congressman. He weaves Zioncheck’s life through the 2001 monorail campaign, framing it as a ghost story about Seattle radicalism and its costs. The memoir isn’t really about a monorail or a doomed campaign; it’s about the thin, dangerous line between political idealism and clinical instability.

Removing Zioncheck loses the story’s historical ballast and its most unsettling question: whether Grant’s obsession represents visionary persistence or the modern echo of a tragic mental break, and how Pacific Northwest political culture absorbs and romanticizes both.

The book also lingers on the unease beneath the framing of two white, slacker-intellectuals trying to unseat one of the city’s few Black political leaders. Campbell confronts the ugliness of that tension, questioning how grassroots movements often remain blind to their own privilege and moral certainty. The film acknowledges this dynamic, then quickly retreats to the cleaner abstraction of monorail versus light rail, choosing policy debate over racial and class friction.

Grassroots reads as a love letter to civic engagement in Seattle. Zioncheck for President feels messier and truer, a beautiful, sometimes horrifying autopsy of a midlife crisis unfolding in public. Both love the city, but only one sits with what that love costs and what it reveals about Seattle itself.

This may simply reflect the limits of film versus books, something a smarter person could explain more elegantly. Books allow for nuance that even a three-hour movie struggles to sustain. Film demands loss. A loss that text can afford to keep.

So maybe we’re stuck if we focus only on film.

Broader Narratives

Supersonic and West of Here are two sweeping novels that attempt to wrap in more faithfully the missing context that a true narrative of the Pacific Northwest brings to the table.

But books like Survival Math by Mitchell S. Jackson and No-No Boy by John Okada cut deeper, peeling back the familiar Pacific Northwest mythology of tech, evergreen cutaway shots, and coffee-fueled progressivism in a white space. They reveal a regional story shaped instead by displacement, survival, and the hard geometry of who gets to belong.

Supersonic and West of Here gesture toward these realities, but they stop short of plunging into the disphotic zone of regional narrative.

No-No Boy’s Seattle looks nothing like the Emerald City of boosterism and nostalgia. The postwar International District barely breathes. Streets like Jackson become psychological checkpoints rather than simple routes. The protagonist moves through the city as an intruder, hyper-aware of his body, his history, and his perceived betrayal. The city doesn’t welcome him back; it watches him, measures him, reminds him that reintegration is conditional.

Jackson’s Portland in Survival Math stands as the inverse of the Portlandia fantasy. It isn’t quirky, gentle, or ironic. It is a city designed, architecturally and socially, to contain, monitor, and discard Black residents.

If the cinematic Seattle of the 90s was a “white oasis,” Zia Mohajerjasbi’s Know Your Place gives us the irrigation system, the grueling, uphill labor required to sustain a life in the cracks of the “urban aspiration.” Telling the story of an Eritrean-American teenager on an odyssey across the hills of the Central District to deliver a suitcase of medicine, the film allows the physical geography of the city to sync with the lived experience of marginalized inhabitants. Know Your Place doesn’t settle for the postcard views of the Space Needle that serve Grey’s Anatomy. Seattle is not a “safe haven” but a labyrinth of disappearing landmarks and a society that doesn’t serve everyone.

In Know Your Place, Survival Math’s displacement becomes visual. We see historic Black and immigrant-owned spaces not as footnotes, but as a vibrant, fragile reality being physically overwritten by the expanding white footprint. Like No-No Boy, the film uses the city’s verticality to illustrate social friction. Every hill climbed in Know Your Place is a reminder of the economic and systemic weight carried by the main character. By centering the East African community, the movie moves past the novel edginess of grunge to find the actual city, a complex, multi-layered heritage waiting for a lens.

Seattle Knows Itself

So, in a genre I know better (local history), this is Megan Asaka’s Seattle from the Margins as compared to Murray Morgan’s Skid Road. The quirky, mostly white, working-class history of Morgan’s Seattle presents the anti-Chinese 1886 riots as a dramatic, chaotic, and shameful moment of civic breakdown. Morgan uses his wit to describe the “vigilante” committees and the “horrible friendliness” of the mob herding people onto ships. However, he treats the event as a temporary fever, a singular eruption of “hate” in an otherwise colorful, rough-and-tumble town.

The deeper truth, explained by Asaka, is that the riots were a symptom of a deeper design of Seattle that kept non-white communities in Seattle on the margins.

The difficulty Seattle faces in cultural representation is still the inverse of Los Angeles’s problem: while LA is constantly filmed but denied self-expression, Seattle rarely gets to play itself. Instead, Seattle serves as a cinematic concept that erases our deeper understanding of our own place and our own history. The baggage that white people carry from across the country lands on our regional narrative when they use Seattle to tell stories or to move here.

This preference for the abstraction of grunge, Starbucks, and tech aspiration over geography warps the city’s narrative, overlooking its historical complexity and marginalized communities. But recently, we are seeing films that sync the city’s physical and social terrain with the lived experience of those on the margins.

Unpacking the Cascadian Calm

December 20, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 2 Comments

Twelve years ago, I wrote a blog post attempting to provide a historical context for our regional personality. I wanted to push back against the “Seattle Freeze,” that ubiquitous, slightly whiny framing of Pacific Northwest social life and replace it with something more accurate: Cascadian Calm.

Recently, the “Freeze” discourse bubbled up again in the Stranger, this time through the lens of dog-walking etiquette. A writer recounted an encounter with a “Gen-X white lady” who, upon seeing another dog approaching, ducked into the street to avoid a greeting. The writer’s takeaway was a scorched-earth anonymous rant: “Are you too socially anxious and screen-addicted to acknowledge the existence of your neighbors?”

There is a lot to unpack there, but the most important thing is the perspective shift, which is not something I would have done 12 years ago. To the writer, the woman was antisocial. To the woman, she was likely practicing responsible dog ownership: proactively avoiding a potential conflict between two leashed animals. While the writer sounded angry, they were likely just lonely. But asking “What the fuck is wrong with you?” is rarely the key that unlocks a neighbor’s front door.

This interaction is the “Freeze” in a microcosm. It isn’t a social disease; it is a clash of metabolic rates.

The Myth of the Freeze

What we call the “Seattle Freeze” is actually a reaction inside the Cascadian Calm. It is a mechanism to avoid negative friction. In the Northwest, we practice “assent by silence” or the “dirty yes.” We remove ourselves from situations to prevent the temperature from rising.

The “Freeze” as a brand surfaced around 2005, a period of moderate population growth following the Dot-Com bust. But the grievance is much older.

Knute Berger points to post-World War I when civic promoters attempted to make the entire city friendly. I like to point to the post-World War II era. In my original post, I wrote about a July 1946 letter to the editor by a veteran named D.K. He described himself as a “strange outsider” unable to break into Seattle’s “charmed circle.” This is the Freeze.

Other residents wrote back (this is when letters to the editor were the comment thread), and D.K. eventually agreed that if he worked hard enough, he’d make friends. But, he pointed out, it still was different here.

But, here the context was important. Seattle in 1946 was going through jarring transition as a region. Seattle was pivoting from a resource-extraction outpost to a global tech hub. After the war, Boeing slashed its workforce from 50,000 to 9,000 almost overnight. Thousands of African Americans who arrived for defense jobs were finding their place in a shifting social hierarchy, while the Japanese American community returned from internment to find their neighborhood effectively erased. In this era of high turnover and economic “post-war blues,” the “Freeze” was the friction of a city trying to redefine its boundaries while new residents hammered on the glass.

The Science of the “Sane”

If we look at the academic data regarding regional personality, the Pacific Northwest is defined by High Openness and Low Neuroticism.

The academic study of “Regional Personality” is a relatively young but robust field, led by psychologists. Research suggests that personality traits aren’t just randomly distributed; they “cluster” geographically through a process called selective migration. People don’t just move for jobs; they move toward “psychological fit.”

The “Cascadian Calm” is placed squarely within the “Open and Creative” profile of regional personalities. Researchers found that the Northwest consistently ranks among the highest in the nation for Openness to Experience. This isn’t just about trying new foods; it’s a psychological marker for curiosity, non-traditional thinking, and a high tolerance for ambiguity. We are a region of people who are comfortable with “not knowing,” which allows for a certain social looseness that outsiders often mistake for a lack of structure or care.

Crucially, this high openness is paired with consistently low Extraversion. This is the scientific bedrock of the “Freeze.” The region skews heavily toward introversion, recharging through solitude, the “middle of nowhere,” or quiet intellectualism rather than social performance. While a transplant from a “Friendly and Conventional” region (like the Midwest) might view a quiet sidewalk as a social failure, the data suggests that for the Cascadian, that silence is a sign of high emotional stability. We aren’t panicking in the quiet.

This creates what academics call a Cognitive Resilience factor. Because we also score low on Neuroticism, we tend to be less rattled by emotional swings. This produces a “stable” atmosphere that can feel “robotic” to someone from a high-stress, high-energy urban center. You see a neighbor in distress and think, “I should respect their privacy so they can process this,” while the newcomer thinks, “Why isn’t anyone rushing over to help?”

Furthermore, the PNW is part of the “None Zone,” the most secular region in the country. In the South or the Midwest, the “charmed circle” D.K. wrote about in 1946 is often held together by the glue of the church or civic clubs. In the Northwest, those institutions are historically weak. Without these pre-packaged social on-ramps, our natural introversion becomes a walled garden. You aren’t being excluded because of a lack of manners; you’re being excluded because there is no formal onboarding process for the neighborhood. We are a society of high-trust individuals who simply lack the performative rituals to show it.

Think of the Pacific Northwest as a peaceful library. The environment values quiet, respects your personal space, and offers a sympathetic nod if you drop your books, but it won’t necessarily rush over to help you pick them up. This isn’t rudeness; it’s a “live and let live” philosophy that assumes you value your autonomy as much as we value ours.

DK and Kim’s Journey

The most fascinating part of this 12-year conversation has been the comment section of my original post. Specifically, the evolution of a commenter named Kim. There are specific echoes with Kim’s journey as there were with DK when he was integrating into Seattle in 1946.

In 2013, Kim arrived from Atlanta in a state of “culture shock.” Her early comments were vitriolic: “It’s called MANNERS. It should be taught during childhood.” She viewed the Cascadian Calm as a moral failing.

But by 2020, after moving to Southern California and San Francisco, Kim returned to Seattle by choice. Her perspective had undergone a radical shift. She realized that while other regions might offer more “performative” hospitality, they didn’t offer the “fit” she required. She stopped demanding the city change for her and started navigating it, joining meetups, volunteering, and “pushing through.” She moved from cultural combat to cultural integration. The “Freeze” didn’t melt; she just learned how to dress for the weather.

Looking back at D. K.’s 1946 grievance is to see the “Freeze” in its ancestral form: a raw, post-war loneliness that felt like a moral indictment of the city. D. K. was a man beating his fists against a “charmed circle,” interpreting Seattle’s lack of immediate, back-slapping hospitality as a sign that he was an “intruder” in his own country. His evolution, however, was stunted by the era; he viewed the responsibility of “community spirit” as a debt the city owed him, a service to be rendered to the returning veteran. While he eventually expressed gratitude for the few who reached out, his letters remained anchored in a sense of exclusion. Unlike the modern Kim, who eventually realized that the city is a landscape to be navigated rather than a wall to be climbed, D. K. represents the tragic first stage of the transplant’s journey: the belief that a quiet city is a dead city, and that a neighbor’s silence is a locked door rather than a boundary of respect.

The Social Capital Paradox

Critics call our behavior “passive-aggressive” or “cliquish.” They argue that the regional culture is a “monoculture” that forces extroverts to “tone down.”

However, there is a paradox at play. While regions like the South rank high in “social graces” (the “Southern Charm” model), they often rank lower in verifiable social capital, institutional trust, and actual community engagement. The Pacific Northwest ranks higher in these metrics. We may not say “hello” on the sidewalk, but we trust the library system, we show up for the public hearing, and we maintain the trail.

Our “Calm” may be the byproduct of a society that feels socially secure enough that it doesn’t require performative politeness to maintain order.

The New Friction

The complaints about the “Freeze” always peak during eras of high migration: the post-WWI era, the post-WWII era, the 90s tech boom, and the post-Great Recession surge.

The angry dog-walker from the Stranger was right about one thing: “Community takes a little effort.” But empathy is a two-way street. Assuming the worst intentions of your neighbor, assuming they are “screen-addicted” rather than simply “dog-cautious,” is the very energy that keeps the “Freeze” intact.

The regional personality isn’t going to change. The Cascadian Calm is a feature of the landscape. We aren’t unfriendly; we are just waiting for you to realize that in this library, silence is a sign of respect.

The “Cascadian Calm” is a sturdy psychological chassis, but even the most resilient systems have a breaking point. Since the “Seattle Freeze” moniker was minted in 2005, the region has been battered by the curse of living in interesting times. We have endured the Great Recession, the social fracture of the Trump eras, the global pandemic, and a housing crisis that finally saw the dam break on affordability. The civic trust that once allowed us to be “quiet but kind” is fraying. In Seattle itself, the political pendulum swings wildly from progressive experimentation to reactionary moderation, a symptom of a city that has lost its steady hand on the tiller.

When our larger systems (zoning, housing, and the mayor’s office) seem to fail us, our reliance on that old tradition of social capital is shaken. In this high-anxiety environment, the “Freeze” stops being a respectful boundary and starts looking like a defensive crouch. We are leaning into the withdrawal aspect of our personality because we are tired, but as our angry dog-walker from The Stranger proves, leaning into the Freeze doesn’t do us any favors. It only deepens the isolation.

We are, as a region and a people, imperfect. We cannot reach back into 1946 and fix D.K.’s loneliness, nor can we undo the administrative erasures of the last century. We can only do better today by refusing to let our “Calm” turn into coldness.

I will say that living in and writing from Olympia seems to be calmer water than I described above. We tend to vote towards the middle of our choices. Not necessarily progressive or moderate, but definitely not reactionary in either way. The recent election results since 2021 have solidified this belief for me. There is a bare minimum of progressive politics that any candidate needs to pass, but the other requirement is both engagement with the community and a seriousness in their approach that rejects reactionary politics. This reminds me that while Seattle may get all the attention and attempts to drag the region around, the rest of Cascadia still exists and may be a better example of what we strive for.

The work of community is surprisingly simple, though not easy: it requires us to do exactly what the anonymous ranter failed to do: assume the best of the person standing next to you. Whether they are ducking into the street to manage a nervous dog or simply keeping their head down in the rain, they aren’t your enemy. They are just another Cascadian, navigating the same landscape, waiting for someone to prove that the circle isn’t quite as “charmed” (or as closed) as it looks.

Olympia as Ghost Town

December 13, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 3 Comments

When I wrote last week about Tono, I was thinking about all the non-Tono ghost towns we don’t think about, the ones lost to inaccessibility, or those that never managed to keep their ruins standing. Lewis County has a dozen or so of these across the timber and coal industries (Hurn, Mendota, and others): towns that simply ran out of reason to be.

Tono taught us that history survives the physical. It was a place erased by corporate action and resource exhaustion, its memory surviving in old maps and the stubborn curiosity of GIS layers. I argued that the built environment is not the memory. The detailed records (what we can piece together) are the memory.

But what I’ve always wondered about is a ghost town lost in plain sight. What if Puget City, north of Lacey, had grown during the resource era, died, been forgotten, and then completely paved over in the name of urban progress?

While not a perfect example of growth, decline, and erasure by suburbia, the East Capitol Campus in Olympia is a lost, ghosted city. And it explains a lot about what went wrong in Olympia’s growth after the 1950s.

The Lost City

Tono was a company town that faded out. This Olympia neighborhood was healthy, dense, and killed.

The destruction spanned 18 blocks, bounded by Capitol Way on the west, Jefferson on the east, 11th on the north, and Maple Park on the south. This is now the collection of state office buildings across from the Capitol Campus proper. The neighborhood included a rich tapestry of density that Olympia today desperately tries to rebuild: no fewer than six apartment buildings (two with over 30 units), duplexes, the Girl Scouts clubhouse, and at least one store.

It was also the second location of William Winlock Miller (aka Olympia) High School. The state’s appetite for land here was so great that this was the second time the expanded Capitol Campus displaced Olympia High School. The original Olympia HS was on Water Street, a location that no longer exists but was roughly between the diagonal drive and the big old oak by the Sunken Gardens.

The catalyst for this violence was not a coal vein running out, but a court case: State ex rel. Lemon v. Langlie (1954). The ruling, which forced state executive offices to maintain their main offices in Olympia, solidified the city as the seat of government, and in doing so, condemned this residential district.

The Bureaucratic Weapon

The killing wasn’t a sudden demolition; it was a long, cold administrative death. The original buildings: Highway Licensing (1961), Employment Security (1961), and Archives (1964) came first. But the real destruction happened in the 1970s, after the city eliminated the historic cross-streets by vacating rights-of-way in the mid-1960s.

This is the big deal. You can build around a neighborhood; you can’t sustain a community once its streets have been wiped off the map. Ironically, the original right-of-way for 12th Avenue still exists, running straight through the 1991 Natural Resources Building. The built environment was literally erased.

In the 1960s, the state set out to take over 75 properties. The struggle put a human face on the process through the saga of Roy H. Bergh, 77, and his wife Leila, 72. The Berghs resisted the state’s efforts for about 13 years, leading to a prolonged legal battle involving condemnation and, ultimately, their eviction and jailing in 1973. They felt the state had “stolen” their property. The land they went to jail for is now part of the northern flank of the Natural Resources Building, at what used to be the corner of 12th and Franklin.

This ideological erasure was compounded by massive infrastructure projects that completed the destruction. Interstate 5 was constructed along the back edge of the neighborhood, and Plum Street was expanded via Henderson Boulevard into Southeast Olympia. We can’t overstate how radically this shifted access, suddenly, getting into that end of town by car mattered more than moving through the old city grid. While citizens voted to save Watershed Park in 1955, just five years later we were putting a road through it on the way to the third Olympia (William Winlock Miller) High School.

The Brutalist Betrayal

The final product, designed in the 1970s, was a monument to the state’s ambitions, and it failed to provide value to Olympia.

What we have now was designed in the Brutalist tradition, characterized by austere, monolithic concrete forms and monumental scale. This architecture prioritizes power and control over human-scale interaction and community. The new East Campus, most notably the manically vaguely named “Office Building 2” (1975) and the massive underground garage (1975), which famously began leaking almost immediately, was a policy failure if the goal was to create a human-scaled, useful addition to the city.

The creation of the East Campus shifted the center of civic life (the high school) to a contested border with another city (Tumwater) and promoted the development of car-centric districts, reinforced by millions of dollars in bonds for parking facilities.

The result is a landscape largely divorced from human use or utility: massive, useless expanses of lawn that no one occupies; a long stretch of Capitol Way with no sidewalk on its east side; and the bizarre arrangement of walkways threading around the buildings.

This is a space most often transited rather than enjoyed. Protests happen across the street at the Legislative Building. Community events take place downtown or around Capitol Lake. This is a broad civic space that no one uses, or even thinks about, unless they’re forced to inconveniently walk through it because they parked somewhere else.

Around OB2 and the Natural Resources Building, paths curve toward nowhere. A grand staircase ends in grass. Rounded walkways circle a vestigial OB2 entrance along Jefferson.

This area was supposed to be the beginning of “Ceremonial Drive,” a road that would have snaked around the buildings near where the Natural Resources Building now stands and where the old courthouse (now Capitol Court) remains.

What did we lose for that odd arrangement of nothing on Jefferson? Five houses and four duplex units. The East Campus is the grandly designed version of a exclusively zoned single family neighborhood. Nothing in walking distance, so if you leave your house on foot (or accidentally walk through East Campus) it is only for the act of walking, not going anywhere there.

Tono taught me that losing physical structures isn’t the same as losing history, you can reconstruct the past from afar. But the East Campus teaches something else entirely: some change is an ideological act of violence against history.

I’m not arguing the neighborhood should have been frozen in time, or that the state shouldn’t have expanded. But this neighborhood was never allowed to evolve. Today, state offices are at least expected to weave into neighborhoods, imperfect as that system is. The East Campus, by contrast, was simply killed, wiped off the face of the city.

And I point this out without irony as residents of the South Capitol Neighborhood fight a pitched battle against legislative-centric businesses expanding into residential homes, that they were the original target of campus planners’ expansionist ambitions.

Before heading east, the proposal envisioned a southern expansion of the campus. More than 20 acres of the South Capitol neighborhood would have been razed and replaced with new government buildings, along with a rounded road system that would have largely replaced the existing street grid.

But we all know how this ended. The campus expanded east, not south. Instead of annexing a more affluent neighborhood, the state razed a more middle-class community on its eastern flank.

You can’t stand today in the middle of this vast, empty expanse and pretend the past is intact. But because the architecture and landscaping are so empty and silent, the history still exists, in the sad story of the Berghs, the memories of the high schoolers, and the ghosted street grid beneath our feet. The built environment is not the memory. And thank goodness, because in this case, the builders made sure the built environment was a lie.