Olympia Time

History, politics, people of Oly WA

Category: washington history (Page 1 of 3)

We Fought Iron Giants. And Won. We Fought Hardwood Oligarchs.

March 28, 2026 / / 0 Comments

You can look at our place and see a finished product. We look at the Tacoma waterfront, the glass of Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, and the landscape of a state that is established and permanent.

But if you scratch the surface of our legal code, specifically the patchwork of our 1889 Constitution, you see the scars of a street fight.

Washington State was not born from a polite agreement of settlers. It was wrestled into existence through a decades-long struggle against the iron hegemony of the railroads. Everything we have is a result of a battle. Our early history is born of wars with the railroads.

This history isn’t just a footnote, it is the fundamental DNA of our political identity. It’s why we were the rare state to let an NBA team walk rather than pay a ransom. It’s why, in 2026, as the NBA finally prepares to return to Seattle, they are doing so on our terms.

The Grange and the Commission

In the late 19th century, railroads were using discriminatory rates to crush small farmers while favoring industrial giants. They peddled influence by handing out free rail passes to judges and legislators. It was the 1890s version of a luxury suite.

Led by the Grange movement, Washingtonians spent twenty years agitating for oversight. The railroads argued that a regulatory commission would drive capital from the state. That threat has remained remarkably unchanged for 130 years. In 1905, the people finally won and established the first Railroad Commission.

Capital did not, in the end, flee the state.

This wasn’t just about freight rates. It was a shift in the social contract. It established that a corporation operating in Washington has a legal obligation to serve the public interest. That commission evolved into today’s Utilities and Transportation Commission. It’s a persistent reminder that in this state, we look at the books of the powerful before we give them our blessing.

The 2008 Divorce: Strategic Non-Cooperation

Fast forward a century, and the role of the iron masters had been replaced by the Oklahoma City barons. In 2008, when Howard Schultz and later Clay Bennett demanded a public ransom to bring KeyArena up to NBA standards, they expected Washington to follow a specific model of governance. They thought we would subsidize a billionaire or let them steal our civic identity.

But Seattle applied what social theorist Gene Sharp calls nonviolent resistance. Sharp points out that power isn’t monolithic. It relies on “pillars of support.” By refusing to provide the financial pillar of a public subsidy, the city and the state withdrew their cooperation. We decided that the big league brand wasn’t worth the public debt.

We watched the Sonics leave for Oklahoma City. That city continues to fund its status through massive public sales taxes for arenas that will never make the public treasury whole. Seattle, meanwhile, waited. We practiced strategic patience. We waited for a private investor who saw the inherent value of our market.

The 2026 Return: Value over Ransom

This week, the NBA’s Board of Governors finally voted to explore expansion back to Seattle. The projected winners aren’t a group of out-of-state threat-makers. It’s Samantha Holloway and the Kraken ownership group. Crucially, they aren’t asking for a handout. They’ve already spent the private capital to build Climate Pledge Arena. This proves that when you have a community worth being in, the private sector will eventually adapt to your terms.

This reality makes the current debate over Washington’s 9.9% tax on millionaires feel like a repeat of the 1905 Railroad Commission fight. Republican legislators spent a record number of hours during the legislative session claiming that this millionaire tax would ensure the NBA would never return. They argued billionaires would never subject their millionaire players to a 9.9% hit on income over $1 million. They warned of a millionaire exodus.

Ironically, Howard Schultz was the first to flee, but he will likely be the rare one. As Professor Cristobal Young’s research shows, millionaires are the least mobile income group. They stay for the social and professional networks and the value of the community. Notably, Schultz is mostly retired. His wealth is in the bag. He actually has no reason to maintain ties here because he’s already taken what he needs.

The NBA is yawning past our tax because they care about money. They’re moving forward because Washington is a premier global market. Our community matters more than their tax preference.

The Joy of Sport vs. The Luxury Box

While we celebrate the return of the Sonics, we have to look at the disparity in our own backyard. We do not build billion-dollar arenas for the elite with public funds. But in cities like Olympia, we struggle to find the space or funding to build a single new soccer field for a local rec league.

In 2022, the state pointed out that only 24% of Washington youth met physical activity guidelines. Adult physical fitness tracks similarly, with women reporting lower numbers than men. Our travel ball culture has turned youth sports into a commercial product. It prioritizes elite sorting over universal access. For adults, field access is worse than for kids since most of our access is limited to schools. We are relegated to expensive corporate gyms.

The Senate passed SR 8664 to address the pent-up demand for recreation, but the funding remains a shadow of what we once considered giving to billionaires.

We should look to the Norwegian model, where the “joy of sport” is a fundamental right. In Norway, profits from the national gambling monopoly are funneled directly into local clubs and fields. They ban national championships and scorekeeping for children under 13 to keep the focus on social development rather than professional scouting. It is a system built for the 100%, not the 1%.

The Rich Can Take Care of Themselves, We Need to Take Care of Each Other

The history of Washington is a history of learning the same lesson the hard way. The rich can and do take care of themselves. We gave tax breaks to Boeing for decades, and they took the jobs to Chicago and South Carolina the moment it suited their bottom line.

Our governance should be for the people who stay. It should be for the runner on the local trail, the parent looking for a soccer field, and the citizen who believes our waterfronts and our infrastructure belong to the public.

In 1889, we fought the railroads and won. In 2008, we fought the NBA and didn’t blink. As we welcome the Sonics back, we do so with the confidence of a state that knows its own worth. We don’t need to subsidize the powerful to be Big League. We already are.

HB 2554 and the Long Shadow of Initiative 456

March 7, 2026 / / 0 Comments

A relic of institutionalized racism has lived in a corner of Washington State law for over 40 years. As House Bill 2554 moves through the 2026 legislative session, that language is finally on the verge of being wiped clean.

The bill seeks to remove the statutory leftovers of Initiative 456. It was a ballot measure passed in 1984 during a time of intense anger toward tribal sovereignty. Similar repeal efforts made very little headway in 2010 and 2021, but the persistent work of Representative Debra Lekanoff has finally pushed the bill onto the governor’s desk. I wrote about this history five years ago, but I want to revisit it again.

It did receive a strange amount of opposition in the House. Most of that dissent focused on the technicality of repealing a voter-approved initiative rather than a defense of the words themselves.

To understand why this repeal matters, we have to look back at the concerted efforts to dismantle tribal treaty rights that followed the Boldt Decision.

The roots of Initiative 456 go back to the immediate aftermath of 1974’s U.S. v. Washington (the Boldt Decision). When the Supreme Court finally upheld Judge Boldt’s ruling in 1979, it did so against a backdrop of defiance. It is important to remember that the Supreme Court did not just uphold the Boldt Decision itself. It ruled on a group of cases that were actively trying to overturn it. These cases started in local courts and wound their way through the State Supreme Court and finally into federal courts. They were an effort by private actors (like fishing charter owners) to force the state of Washington to stop recognizing the sovereignty of treaty tribes in salmon management.

This era of resistance is best captured through the words of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Alfred Goodwin wrote the appeals-level decision in the “Passenger Vessel” case. He did not hold back regarding the state’s behavior. Goodwin was born in Bellingham and spent his youth in the Pacific Northwest. He eventually became one of the most respected judges in the country.

He observed that the resistance to tribal rights was uniquely aggressive. He wrote: “Except for some desegregation cases …, the district court has faced the most concerted official and private efforts to frustrate a decree of a federal court witnessed in this century.”

This comparison to the Jim Crow era South was not an exaggeration. He was writing in the 1970s when the comparison to the legal opposition to school desegregation was fresh and real. It was a direct reflection of the legal and physical blocks put in place to prevent tribes from using their court-affirmed right to half of the harvestable salmon.

In our own backyard, the Thurston County Courthouse was a stage for this resistance. Local judges, including Gerry Alexander, found themselves in a jurisdictional tug of war. Groups like the Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Association sued state agencies in local courts. Judges like Alexander would rule in their favor, leaning on state law. The groups wanted the state to stop complying with federal orders. They argued that the fifty percent allocation violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution. They were essentially trying to use state law to override federal treaty obligations.

When the U.S. Supreme Court finally used the Supremacy Clause to cancel these state judgments, the opposition did not give up. It just moved from the courtroom to the ballot box.

Initiative 456 was born from this shift in tactics. It was organized by a group called S/SPAWN, which stood for Steelhead and Salmon Protection Action for Washington Now. The measure was a masterclass in mom and apple pie political framing. Supporters admitted to writing the ballot title to sound deceptively wholesome. They wanted to avoid any immediate association with the controversial Boldt Decision. By focusing on the decommercialization of steelhead and claiming that state natural resource management should not consider special rights based on race, they confused a lot of voters. Polling at the time showed that half of the voters were undecided. Many were simply confused by the technical language.

This confusion is born out in the results. Initiative 456 had the third largest voter drop-off of any statewide election on the 1984 ballot. Only insurance and lands commmissioner races drew fewer voters. Initiative 464 (which dealt with sales tax on cars) had the most voters. Initiatives show up at the top of the ballot, so for over 28 percent of voters to drop off between one initiative and the next, and then to turn back around and vote in other races, it means something. If 75 percent of the voters who didn’t vote on 456 had voted against it, the initiative would have failed.

Despite a massive coalition of opposition, the initiative passed in all but four counties. This opposition coalition included Senator Dan Evans, church leaders, environmentalists, and even major timber companies. They argued the initiative was racist and illegal under the Supremacy Clause. They also warned that it threatened international fishing treaties with Canada.

The opposition campaign did not do its job to turn the undecided votes into no votes. Looking back at last week’s essay on pragmatism, I could see a simpler argument was possible, focusing on “we’re a serious state, we need to focus on bigger things and not let opposition to treaty rights define us” being an easy reason to vote no. But the populist appeal of “equal rights” carried the day. It was framed as the removal of special tribal privileges.

The 456 longtail

While the initiative was largely a message to Congress with no immediate power to override federal law, it stayed a strong political tool for years. Senator Slade Gorton tried to implement the core goals by introducing a federal bill in 1985. He wanted to ban tribal commercial steelhead fishing. The effort failed and even created a rift among conservatives. Senator Dan Evans joined the Reagan administration in speaking out against it.

However, the spirit of I-456 was kept alive by later Republican candidates for governor like Bob Williams (1988) and Ken Eikenberry (1992). Both insisted they would enforce the initiative if they were elected. Eikenberry’s endorsement showed that anti-tribal sentiment stayed embedded in the state’s conservative platform for years after the initial vote.

Another reason why 456 mattered was that the tribes’ work wasn’t done in the 1980s. A year after Bob Williams lost in the governor’s race, the tribes went back to court to reaffirm their treaty rights to shellfish, just as they had done in the 1970s for salmon. The decision to expand the federal understanding of treaty rights was not firm, and the tribes did not understand where exactly this new fight would end. Eventually, spanning the time of the Eikenberry campaign, the tribes would win reaffirmation of 50 percent of the shellfish harvest in 1995. But it was a possibility that with shellfish and its corresponding issues of private shellfish companies and private property rights on beaches, the treaty rights structure would fall apart.

Also by the mid-1990s, I-456 began to lose its relevance. The state started to transition toward more stable co-management. Tribal political power grew significantly. Campaign donations increased from the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As the state and tribes moved further into what people called the “dawn of cooperation,” the aggressive tactics of the 1970s started to look outdated. Although the language of the initiative stayed in the Revised Code of Washington, it was seen as dead law. It was unenforceable because federal treaties are the supreme law of the land.

If you look at the actual text of RCW 77.110, you can see why it’s so problematic. It claims that the state should not recognize any rights to natural resources based on “ancestry” or “race.” This sounds fair on a very surface level, which is why the “Mom and apple pie” strategy worked so well. But in the context of Indian law, this is a direct attack on the political status of tribes. Treaties are not based on race. They are agreements between sovereign nations. By trying to redefine treaty rights as racial privileges, the writers of I-456 were trying to strip away the legal foundation of tribal sovereignty.

Our history can have a haunting presence.

There is a current lawsuit filed by Fish Northwest against the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife following the same pattern as the Passenger Vessel era lawsuits in the 1970s. Fish Northwest is an interesting group that has picked up anti-tribal sentiment that has found new energy over the past 10 years or so. Their litigation strategy echoes the past efforts by trying to cancel current fishing rules through state administrative law. It was filed in the same Thurston County Superior Court that hosted the original post-Boldt challenges. Currently, Fish Northwest is challenging salmon fishing seasons by claiming the state failed to follow procedures like the Regulatory Fairness Act.

The parallels are striking. The state describes the current lawsuit as a backdoor attempt to attack a federal agreement in state court. This happened after Fish Northwest was denied the right to join the federal U.S. v. Washington case directly. The underlying motive is still the same old “Fair Share” grievance. It is a long-standing belief that non-treaty fishers are not getting their due.

In July 2025, a Thurston County judge granted part of their petition. The judge found that the state’s rules were invalid because they failed to conduct a required Small Business Economic Impact Statement. This is a clever evolution of the 1970s and 1984 tactics. Instead of attacking treaties directly, they are using the language of “regulatory fairness” and “small business protection” to gum up the works.

This small business angle is particularly cynical. It frames the state’s cooperation with tribes as a burden on local economies. It ignores the fact that tribal fishing is also a massive economic driver for the region. While the state is currently appealing this ruling, the case represents a spirit that refuses to see tribes as partners. It is an attempt to run around decades of established case law.

As HB 2554 nears the governor’s desk in 2026, it serves as more than just a legislative cleanup. It is a formal rejection of the era of frustration described by Judge Goodwin. By removing the language of Initiative 456, the state is closing the book on an era that tried to turn Washington back into a battlefield of resistance.

Legal challenges like the one from Fish Northwest will probably keep happening. But they will no longer have the comfort of seeing their ideas reflected in our state laws. The meaningless words are finally being stripped away. This leaves room for a future defined by working together rather than constant conflict. We’ve spent forty years with these words on the books. It’s about time we stop letting the past dictate how we manage our future.

Bush, Billings and the Peace that Forces Out

February 28, 2026 / / 1 Comment

South Puget Sound holds a secret about our local character. We are not a monolith; we are the result of decades of pragmatic decisions resulting from a slow-motion collision. To understand why Washington works the way it does, you have to look past the modern Evergreen progressivism. You have to see the ghosts of two rival civilizations, New England and Appalachia, fighting it out over decades and finding ways to make peace. This dualism of the region is best described by Colin Woodard’s American Nations in his description of the Left Coast region.

Our regional identity is defined by a specific, recurring deal. It’s a truce between the institutional, moralizing drive of the New Englander and the fierce, reactive independence of the Scots-Irish borderer.

This synthesis created a unique form of Western whiteness. It’s pragmatic, corporate, and deeply exclusionary. It’s a culture that prioritizes the peace of the collective and the space of the individual, provided both parties are part of the original cultural contract.

Wealth over the Lash

In 1844, the Oregon Trail was less a path to freedom and more a filter for racial purity. When George Washington Bush reached the Willamette Valley, he was met with the Lash Laws. These weren’t mere suggestions. They were mandates for public whippings every six months for any Black person who refused to leave. This was the raw, Appalachian side of the frontier. It was a warrior ethic designed to protect white labor from any perceived competition, including enslaved peoples.

Bush’s response highlights the first major workaround in our history. He was a Black frontiersman of immense skill and even greater fortune. Rather than submit to the lash or return to Missouri, Bush used his wealth to lead five white families north of the Columbia River. He carried several thousand dollars in silver ingots. By settling in what would become Tumwater, he entered a geopolitical gray zone disputed between the U.S. and Great Britain. Bush was a seasoned veteran of the fur trade who had worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He knew the terrain. He knew the British authorities at Fort Vancouver. He knew how to navigate the cracks between empires.

The pragmatism of the early Washington establishment soon became clear. Federal laws like the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 technically barred Black settlers from owning land. However, the local white leadership saw a different calculation. Bush wasn’t just a neighbor. He was the wealthiest man on the frontier. He had financed the region’s first gristmill and sawmill. During the grain shortage of 1852, he refused to sell his wheat to speculators for a profit. Instead, he shared it freely with hungry white settlers. He only asked for repayment when they were able.

To the Yankee-minded legislators in the new Washington Territory, Bush was an asset to the order they wished to build. In 1855, the Washington Territorial Legislature unanimously petitioned Congress to grant him a special legal title to his 640-acre farm. They didn’t do this to challenge white supremacy. They did it because Bush’s wealth and conduct aligned with the Yankee desire for a stable, prosperous society. The deal was struck. The rules would be bent for the wealthy and the useful, even as exclusion remained the baseline for everyone else. This established a precedent that remains a cornerstone of our regional psyche.

The law is a tool for stability. Stability often requires the pragmatic absorption of exceptional outsiders who bolster the existing order.

The Olympia Method

The tension between these two nations reached a fever pitch in the 1880s during the Chinese expulsion craze. Across the Pacific Northwest, white labor was in revolt. In Tacoma and Seattle, the Appalachian impulse for direct action took over. Mobs led by the Knights of Labor burned Chinatowns and forced residents onto steamers at gunpoint. This was called the Tacoma Method. It was a visceral, populist purging of outsiders to protect the sovereignty of the white worker.

Olympia faced the same pressure on February 9, 1886. A radical mob gathered at the sound of the city’s fire bell. They intended to drive the Chinese population out of their homes on Fourth Avenue. But here, the Yankee impulse for institutional order stood its ground. Sheriff William Billings and 62 leading citizens didn’t step in because they were radicals for equality. In fact, a formal resolution from the Billings group in 1885 showed that the majority of Olympia’s white residents wanted the Chinese gone. They just disagreed on the method.

To the business elite, a riot was godless anarchy. It would ruin the town’s reputation and scare off investors from the East Coast. They were decidedly opposed to expulsion by force because it threatened the fabric of the New England on the Pacific they were trying to build. Under the protection of these deputies, the leaders of the mob were arrested and tried. They were eventually sentenced to prison at McNeil Island. This was a clear message from the Yankee leadership. The warrior ethic of the mob would not dictate the terms of society in the capital.

The law and order faction essentially told the mob that they agreed the Chinese should go, but they wouldn’t have a riot in the capital. They protected the Chinese residents from violence to preserve the sanctity of the law. This created a relative safety for Chinese merchants like Sam Fun Locke. He remained in Olympia for decades. He paid tribute to the Sheriff’s family every Lunar New Year in gratitude for the protection of the state. It was a pragmatic peace. The elite maintained the rule of law. Meanwhile, the white workers were eventually pacified by the slow, legalistic exclusion of Chinese labor through federal acts rather than street brawls.

The Two Nations

To understand why these events played out this way, we have to look at the two distinct parent nations that settled this place.

First, there is Yankeedom. According to Woodard, these settlers came largely by sea. They were the descendants of Puritans who believed in social engineering and the perfectibility of society. They viewed government as a tool to create a moral and highly regulated community. In their view, the collective had a responsibility to oversee the behavior of its members. Theirs was a missionary impulse to bring order to the wilderness.

Then there is Greater Appalachia. These settlers arrived overland via the Oregon Trail. They were the Highlanders of the American South and the Borderlands. Their culture was forged in centuries of constant warfare on the fringes of the British Isles. They were a heritage of border raiders who learned early on that the state was usually an enemy. They brought a warrior ethic and a deep, bone-deep suspicion of any authority that tried to tell them how to live. To them, personal sovereignty and the protection of kith and kin were the only true laws.

The Pacific Northwest became a battlefield where these two cultures collided. The Yankee wanted to build a schoolhouse and a tax system. The Appalachian wanted to be left alone on his prairie with his gun and his family. We see this battle time and time again in our state. In the battle between the Grange and the railroads, fostering the creation of port districts. And then the later subversion of port districts by corporate interests.

The resulting Left Coast culture is a bipolar soul. It is a place that loves regulation but demands individual self-expression and freedom from constraint. The peace between them is maintained by the Yankee side, promising to manage the logistics of the world. They handle the schools, the roads, and the corporate legalities so the Appalachian side can feel free. It is the pragmatism of Yankeedom easing the libertarian needs of the Appalachians. If you need space, they will engineer a way for you to have it, as long as you play by the institutional rules.

The Sawdust Aristocracy

This peace found an economic engine in the timber industry of the early 1900s. The conflict here was between the Industrial Workers of the World and the American Federation of Labor. The IWW, or Wobblies, were the true radicals. They wanted one big union that included everyone. They welcomed workers from different ethnic backgrounds and unskilled laborers. They represented a threat to the racial and social order of the region because they rejected the idea of a cultural contract based on race or skill.

In contrast, the craft unions of the AFL were the aristocrats of labor. They were overwhelmingly white. They bridged the gap between Appalachian Free Labor and corporate interests from New England. They focused on protecting their narrow privileges as skilled workers. As historian Aaron Goings observes, the timber barons found it much easier to deal with the AFL. The corporations and the white craft unions entered an alliance of convenience. The timber barons would grant modest wage increases and better conditions to the white skilled workers. In return, those workers would help the corporations and local vigilante groups purge the militant Wobblies.

This was a classic Yankee-Appalachian deal. The corporate interests provided the structure and the wages. The white workers provided the warrior ethic to keep the radicals at bay. The creation of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen during World War I was the ultimate expression of this deal. It was a company-funded union that combined patriotism with a partnership between capital and white labor. This was the regional identity in its final form. It was a peace between corporations and white workers. They agreed to exclude outsiders as long as it protected the peace and profits of the insiders. The Yankee corporate interest got the stability it needed to grow. The Appalachian descended worker got his sovereignty and his respectable wage. He got the comfort of knowing he was part of the aristocracy of labor.

This is the situation we see reflected in our current landscape. We create a world of high regulation and good government. They are the heirs to the leading citizens who deputized themselves in 1886 to keep the peace.

But to keep the peace, they must buy off the libertarian needs of the regional population. This is done by creating a framework where personal freedom is framed through the lens of corporate access and lifestyle choice. We see the cooperation between people who are deeply attached to kith and kin and the corporate interests that need a predictable environment for capital to thrive. The deal is the same as it was in the timber woods. The corporations provide the order and the space. The people provide the peace.

The whiteness of the region is the silent glue of this deal. It is a majority-white culture that has agreed on a synthesis. We will follow the rules as long as the rules protect our space and our sovereignty. This creates a region that is superficially progressive but deeply exclusionary in practice. We will exclude the outsider if their presence threatens the peace of our corporate labor compact.

Ultimately, our regional identity is a pragmatic one. We are a people who say that if you’re going to get all worked up about needing some space, we’ll figure out a way to get you some space. This is the true meaning of the Left Coast. It is a land where the order is designed to keep the freedom profitable.

The freedom is designed to keep the order from being overthrown. It is a truce written in silver ingots, fire bells, and timber contracts. It is a deal that ensures the aristocrats of labor and the barons of industry can coexist in a quiet, white-washed peace. We have built a world where the pragmatic decision is almost always to protect the status quo of the insiders, even if it means ignoring the ghosts of those who were never invited to the table.

The Power of Nightmares but Dreaming of Something Better

January 31, 2026 / / 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.

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

January 17, 2026 / / 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 / / 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.

Civic apologies and understanding you have a problem

October 11, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Move your feet

When you’re playing defense in soccer and find yourself reaching to poke the ball away from an attacker, it’s a good sign you’re standing in the wrong spot. It’s time to move your feet.

A few years back, I was reminded of the three parts of a good apology because of the falling down the stairs act Lakefair was performing.

It basically goes like this:

Acknowledge and express your feelings: State what you did and how you feel about it. Go beyond a simple “I’m sorry” to show that you’re truly sorry, horrified, or disappointed in yourself.

Validate the harm you caused: Name the damage and explain how you understand it affected the other person. This shows you were listening and gives them a chance to correct your understanding. Don’t police their reaction.

Offer a plan for change: Explain how you’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again with real, concrete steps. Instead of saying, “It won’t happen again,” say what you’ll do differently next time.

The Capital Lakefair organization was stuck at Step 1 of a true apology because their public defenses focused on rules and blame-shifting, not on acknowledging the public’s pain or anger.

For this situation to turn around, the leadership needed first to listen, not just to those who were “yelling,” but to the broader perspectives around them. They needed to realize this was about what they did, not how they were being talked about. To quote Aaron Sorkin in The Newsroom, they had a PR problem because they had a real problem.

As predicted by the “Markets are Conversations” principle, public outrage demands a two-way dialogue. If everyone is yelling, the organization is in the wrong place in that conversation and needs to move its stance (and its actions) to move forward.

I was reminded again of these principles when I read “The Ritual of Civic Apology.”

It’s a great read. In short, Beth Lew-Williams explores the recent trend of Western U.S. cities offering belated formal apologies for the historical expulsion and mistreatment of their Chinese residents. She questions the sincerity, effectiveness, and intended audience of these gestures. After visiting Tacoma and a couple of California cities, she concludes that these civic apologies don’t reach full reconciliation. Whatever wound was left hasn’t been healed by performative apologies. Most barely make it past Step 1 (acknowledging the wrongdoing) without fully naming the harm or committing to real repair.

And what are reparations, if not repair work?

That’s why I’m glad the City of Olympia is studying reparations. I sat down with Mayor Dontae Payne recently to talk about the work Olympia is exploring. One of the things we discussed was the basis of Washington’s Covenant Homeownership Program.

Washington State, like many places, used racially restrictive covenants to exclude nonwhite residents from certain neighborhoods well into the 1960s. Even after they were ruled unenforceable in the late 1940s, new covenants were still being filed in Thurston County right up until open housing laws were passed following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. According to the University of Washington, covenants in Thurston County featured harsher-than-normal language, seemingly to make a point.

The Washington Covenant Homeownership Program was created to help repair the damage caused by decades of racist housing policies like restrictive covenants. It helps first-time homebuyers from communities historically shut out of homeownership by offering zero-interest loans for down payments and closing costs. To qualify, buyers must have moderate incomes and be descendants of people who lived in Washington before 1968 and were harmed by those racist housing rules.

Unsurprisingly, a lawsuit was filed to overturn the program by a conservative organization arguing that it’s discriminatory because it limits eligibility by race, calling it “using racism to fix racism.”

And this is where the ritual of civic apology meets the real world of government finance, legal interpretation, and political will. The harm caused by restrictive covenants (and by zoning choices, biased policing, and other forms of institutional racism) continues to ripple outward. Acknowledging the harm is only the first step. We still struggle to unpack and address the deep, systemic causes.

We always have to be ready to move our feet. Because even as Lew-Williams rightly wonders who these civic apologies are really for, it’s clear to me who should be doing the Sisyphean work of building complete ones. It’s us, those of us here now, who benefited from decades of racist systems.

A framework for approaching racial reparations here should begin with the commitment to give people what they are due and to repair harm done to the broader human community. Justice, rightly understood, is not about assigning guilt to individuals but about restoring balance where it has been lost. The frame for us should be, when one part of the community suffers, the whole is diminished. Addressing historical wrongs, then, is not an act of division but of maintenance.

Sound policy must be grounded in reason and clear-eyed understanding. This is why the work Lew-Williams describes is important, but incomplete. Repairing deep, generational harm isn’t about emotional performance or political convenience. It needs patient study, honesty about causes, and deliberate, thoughtful action. The goal is to act rightly moving forward. To understand we’re in the wrong spot and move our feet.

Centralias Cannot Hold

September 6, 2025 / / 2 Comments

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.

  1. 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.

They Used the Profits to Replace Us

August 2, 2025 / / 2 Comments

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.

Book Review: Excluded (In Cascadia)

June 28, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

“Exluded” is a much-needed addition to several excellent recent books on our horrific history of housing discrimination. Kahlenberg covers the space left open by other recent classics on housing, zoning and structural racism: “The Color of Law” (by Richard Rothstein) and “Race for Profit” (by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor).

“Excluded” also puts a sharp zoom on the recent history of our own region, placing a critical eye at housing policy from the 1970s to today in Seattle and surrounding communities that still impact how many of us talk about zoning, growth and fairness.

The main theme of “Excluded” is how our housing policy perpetuates racial and economic segregation, leading to inequality and limited opportunities for the working-class. Kahlenberg discusses the impact of exclusionary zoning on housing affordability, social mobility, and access to essential services, highlighting the subtlety of economic discrimination compared to traditional forms of prejudice. 

What this book does well is chart the expansion of zoning rules in the years after the federal Fair Housing Act that, in large part, retained the impact of racially-motivated housing convenenants and race-based zoning.

From Chapter 4 (The Meritocratic Elitism Sustains the Walls):

Wealthy white people, for the most part, are not violent in their exclusionary tactics and don’t hurl stones or bottles. What they do hurl are obscure zoning ordinances that keep people out just the same. The exclusion doesn’t take place in widely televised violent confrontations on the streets; it happens in little-noticed confines of zoning or planning board meetings.

Development in zoning laws across western Washington, including Seattle, follows the same pattern that Kahlenberg describes. For decades, white Seattleites used tools like racially restrictive covenants to exclude people of color from their neighborhoods. In the mid-1960s, Seattle voters even voted down a fair housing ordinance that would have made housing discrimination based on race illegal. Not until fair housing became a central issue after the assassination of Martin Luther King did Seattle pass a fair housing ordinance (along with state and federal laws).

Then, Seattle did what many other American communities did, as Kahlenberg writes. If it weren’t possible to exclude people of color based on race, they would erect a structurally racist system based on single-family zoning to ensure economic segregation. The concept of “downzoning” neighborhoods that used to allow a variety of housing types expanded across the region. To illustrate this, the mentions of “downzoning” in the Seattle Times archive went from zero in the 1960s to over 500 mentions in the 1970s.

In Seattle, the end result of five decades of downzoning is white-majority neighborhoods expanding across the city. 

The Leschi neighborhood is a good example of how downzoning throughout the 80s and 90s excluded black neighborhoods from Seattle. One collection of blocks in the Leschi neighborhood went from over 90 percent black in the 1970s to 11 percent black today. Leschi itself was downzoned along with wide stretches of Seattle north of the ship canal in the 1960s and 70s. 

The black population of King County was pushed south and out of Seattle as the white residents in downzoned neighborhoods looked for housing further and further south.

Kahlenberg also points out how the concept of single-family zoning was a central theme in fair housing debates in the 70s. HUD Secretary George Romney (and former Michigan governor) went to Warren, Michigan in 1970 to attempt to force the Detroit suburb to strike single-family zoning and allow smaller, more affordable housing types. His effort failed, his political career ended, and the civil rights organizations retrenched and fought unheralded courtroom battles over single-family zoning in the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast.

According to the NAACP, in the early 70s: the suburbs were “the new civil rights battleground” and we should do battle out in the townships and villages to lower zoning barriers and thereby create opportunities for Negroes seeking housing closer to today’s jobs at prices they can afford and pay.”

National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (also in the early 1970s): segregation won’t stop until “local governments have been deprived of the power… to manipulate zoning and other controls to screen out families on the basis of income and, implicitly, of race.”

What we can say for sure, that our decreasing densities through downzones had very real impacts on the racial makeup of our neighborhoods.

“Excluded” underlines one of the main girders of structural racism: Well-meaning white neighbors don’t have to be racist to benefit from racist outcomes and a racist system. It also underscores the need for the huge layer of people who will tell you they are not racist but participate in racist systems, before you get to people working to dismantle racist systems. 

We know the current landscape of dominant, exclusionary single-family zoning in our region happened at the same time the last tools to legally and openly discriminate in housing were taken away. We also know the nation’s leading civil rights organizations actively worked against exclusionary single-family zoning.

“Excluded” shows that our region’s history is not at all unique.  We should keep that broader context of our place in history in mind as cities work to implement the state legislature’s recently created a minimum zoning standard. Local control through zoning is the tool that low-density neighborhoods used for five decades to sustain racially discriminatory impacts of city-scale zoning.

« Older posts

© 2026 Olympia Time

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑