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Category: washington history (Page 2 of 4)

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.

Ending the Oregon Trail

June 14, 2025 / / 0 Comments

One of my favorite aspects of Pacific Northwest history is the quiet debate about where the Oregon Trail “ended.” Like polite Cascadians, we tend to avoid direct confrontation on the issue, yet more than one city lays claim to the distinction.

Oregon City arguably has the strongest claim, if only because of its museum and the numerous related activities held there.

Olympia also presents a case, being further along the trail and boasting a monument. Over 100 years ago, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed markers along the trail in Washington State, ending in downtown Olymia. We even have a street that follows the old route from Tumwater north into the city, aptly named “Old Oregon Trail.”

Puyallup, home to the most prominent Oregon Trail marker promoter, offers a dark horse entry. Ezra Meeker did more than anyone else to promote the preservation of the trail’s memory. The marker outside his home in Puyallup signifies the starting point of his backward retracing of the Oregon Trail in 1906. Therefore, if he retraced his steps back east, his house could be considered the end.

However, this leads to a larger philosophical argument about trails and their true termination points. The Oregon Trail ended for each family and migrant who put down roots, often displacing the people who already lived here, and began reshaping the landscape to their will.

Technically speaking, the trail north of the Columbia River wasn’t the Oregon Trail, it was the Cowlitz Trail. The Daughters of the American Revolution probably knew this, but retained the “Oregon Trail” moniker to maintain attention on their project of placing markers from the Columbia River to Olympia. Who really needed to mark the end of the Cowlitz Trail when it was so much easier to make and place markers for the more famous Oregon Trail? Ultimately, the Oregon Trail ended wherever any family decided to end it for themselves.

This perspective considers only the dimensions of longitude and latitude.

In terms of time, the Oregon Trail effectively ended when railroads became the most economical way to colonize the Pacific Northwest. The first transcontinental railroad connection to the West Coast opened in 1869, making rail travel to California and then boat travel to the Columbia and Puget Sound much more efficient. In 1883, this line was finally extended, and the Northern Pacific also tied in.

The Oregon Trail primarily mattered to one particular type of Pacific Northwest resident: the displaced Appalachian. Descendants of Scots-Irish people, pushed out of Scotland, into Northern Ireland, and then into the mountain regions west of the east coast, were the biggest beneficiaries of the Oregon Trail. In contrast, railroads and ships brought New Englanders focused on resource extraction and commerce. This juxtaposition, farming versus logging, represents the defining political and cultural conflict within the colonial society on the ocean side of the mountains, stretching from Whatcom County down to some point near central California. (For a deeper dive into this, I recommend Colin Woodard’s American Nations.)

But this still doesn’t fully address our core question: What is the true end of the Oregon Trail?

It ends when we say it ends. Meeker’s journeys to mark the trail itself were an effort to keep the trail, or at least the memory of its mission, alive. History serves as a reminder of our mission, our culture. Marking the trail reminds us that our goal was to transplant our folkways from our previous homes and expand them into this new place.

Ending the Oregon Trail would mean acknowledging this history, but then moving forward toward justice. Our mission up to this point has not been fair, especially to the people who were here before we arrived. Neither the Appalachians nor the New Englanders who arrived by boat were interested, by and large, in justice for the society they displaced or the lives of the people of color they exploited while seeking prosperity.

So, in this way, we are very much still on the Oregon Trail. The Oregon Trail continues today, for everyone stepping out of SeaTac looking for a new mailing address. We are going to continue welcoming new residents; that isn’t in question. What is in question is the society they come into and our values.

Our history is not a static destination. It is a continuous journey shaped by human choices and evolving needs. Just as the trail concluded differently for each family seeking a new beginning, our understanding of our legacy must adapt. To acknowledge the end of the Oregon Trail, in all its varied forms, is not to diminish its historical significance but to recognize its complex and often challenging impact, particularly on the Indigenous communities whose lands were reshaped and lives uprooted by this influx of newcomers.

True historical understanding encourages us to embrace adaptation and growth, ensuring that our reverence for the past does not hinder our ability to address the pressing needs and challenges of today, fostering a society that reflects the values of inclusivity and justice for all who call the Pacific Northwest home.

Ultimately, the “end” of the Oregon Trail lies in how we choose to build our communities and welcome new residents today. It’s a question of whether we allow a rigid adherence to a past vision to limit our collective progress, or if we embrace an understanding of our heritage that prioritizes inclusivity, adaptability, and justice for all who live here now and in the future. The memory of the trail can serve as a powerful reminder of our capacity for change and our ongoing mission to forge a more equitable society, moving beyond simply marking a route to truly understanding its enduring consequences.

Facing the soft xenophobia of Emmett Watson

May 10, 2025 / / 1 Comment

Governor Tom McCall of Oregon and Emmett Watson, the Seattle newspaper columnist I’m pretty sure my parents named me after, occupy a distinct corner of Pacific Northwest history. Both stood (figuratively and, at one point, literally) on the border of our region and asked people not to move here.

But in doing so, they provided air cover for a kind of xenophobic politics that helped cities across the region lower their density limits. Decades later, this became a fatal flaw in our politics and society.

Watson’s approach, from the 1960s through the 1990s, was often humorous and irreverent. He aimed to preserve Seattle’s unique, somewhat quirky character in the face of rapid growth and the perceived homogenization brought by newcomers and big development. He created the fictitious organization “Lesser Seattle” and its mock intelligence arm, “Keep the Bastards Out” (KBO), as playful rebukes to the ambitions of the real “Greater Seattle” boosters and Chamber of Commerce types.

McCall’s message, especially his famous “Visit but don’t stay,” was more direct and environmentally focused. Though charismatic and good with a soundbite, his core concern was growth management to protect Oregon’s environment. His message had broad implications for potential transplants, but his justification was rooted in ecological preservation more than the cultural anxiety that animated Watson.

Watson was definitely funny. And McCall, to Oregonians, was inspiring. But let’s focus on Watson, his impact on our culture, and most importantly, his jokes. He made sure to say that Lesser Seattle and KBO were fictitious, anyone could be the chair, and it was all just a joke.

But the joke was the power.

Jokes are gateways. Seemingly harmless humor targeting certain ideas can desensitize people and create a climate where more extreme rhetoric becomes acceptable. The humor acts as social lubricant, lowering defenses and making strong beliefs sound less shocking.

That’s exactly what happened in our Seattle-centric, Western Washington community. Watson would be cited again and again in letters to the editor as a humorous canary in the coal mine about growth.

Meanwhile, during the same period Watson was writing in earnest, city after city and neighborhood after neighborhood sought and received downzones: larger minimum lot sizes, bans on anything larger than single-family homes, all in the name of “preserving character” and controlling growth.

And again, we don’t need racist intent to have racist outcomes. These local zoning rules, implemented from the 1970s onward, pushed Black families out of whole neighborhoods in Seattle as white homeowners who benefited from post-World War economic growth looked for housing and drove up property values. In Olympia, we have whiter, less populated neighborhoods because we didn’t allow them to grow.

During the same period that Emmett Watson was playfully advocating for “Lesser Seattle” and the fictional “Keep the Bastards Out,” national media narratives were also shaping perceptions of Seattle in the context of racial tensions elsewhere. James Lyons points out in “Selling Seattle,” that following the Los Angeles riots in 1992, Seattle was increasingly portrayed as a desirable and safe haven for white middle-class professionals, a “white oasis” in contrast to the perceived urban decay and racial unrest of cities like Los Angeles. This media framing, while not explicitly espousing exclusionary policies, subtly reinforced an image of Seattle’s whiteness that was protected by exclusionary zoning, as a positive attribute, potentially providing an unconscious backdrop for the further arguments for downzoning that would later exacerbate our housing crisis.

Watson tried to turn serious when talking to author Jonathan Raban late in his career. He started with a joke about the unseriousness of the Lesser Seattle movement, but pivoted to argue for downzoning and neighborhood character, zoning as a tool for protection. Raban, who had moved to Seattle as an already well-known writer and quickly became one of its most insightful and loving critics, pushed back. His words ring even truer now as we try to reverse the policies that led to today’s housing crisis: “…I am very skeptical about zoning laws and many forms of planning. You see, cities have their own organic existence. They evolve naturally as the years go by.”

The fatal error in Watson’s and McCall’s thinking was that California (already experiencing population growth pressure from immigration and a booming economy in the 1960s and ’70s) started ratcheting down zoning density before Oregon and Washington did.

The increased housing costs cited by Cascadian slow-growthers as proof of California’s “insanity” were not a symptom of too much growth, but of housing scarcity. And in response, we put the same shackles on ourselves: cutting housing production, driving up home prices and rents, and contributing to a coast-wide homelessness crisis.

One of the most hilarious twists in this story? McCall and Watson weren’t even revolutionary. They were just the latest copy of a long Cascadian tradition: the impulse to shut the door behind you.

We don’t even need to go back to overtly racist policy to see the pattern. Take an early political race. Michael T. Simmons, arguably the first American to settle in what’s now Western Washington, co-founded Tumwater and led an overland party that arrived when the only competition was Indigenous tribes and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Just a decade after his 1845 arrival, Simmons ran for congressional delegate as an independent. His main issue? That too many “newcomers” were taking over local political parties and that the “old settlers” needed a voice to preserve their history.

He’d been here ten years. And already, Simmons was the “old settler.”

Who could own what and who owned what

April 26, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes I have an idea (like a few weeks ago) to figure something out, put together a research plan, execute it, and still come up seriously short. That’s exactly what happened the last couple of weeks as I tried to dig into the Alien Land Law and how it worked in Olympia.

One piece of our particular brand of Pacific Northwest racism that I left out of my post a few weeks back was, of course, the Alien Land Law. It existed for nearly our entire history, lasting until 1966, and undergirded much of how we treated racial minorities in the Pacific Northwest.

Long Background on Alien Land Laws

The Alien Land Law in Washington State, rooted in the state 1889 constitution and subsequent legislation, prohibited land ownership by residents ineligible for citizenship. Though seemingly race-neutral in its language, its primary aim was to disenfranchise non-white immigrants, particularly Chinese and Japanese individuals.

Initially, territorial law encouraged non-citizen land ownership to attract white settlers and foreign investment. However, economic anxieties among white laborers and farmers, combined with a rising tide of anti-Chinese sentiment, soon led to laws restricting land ownership for those deemed “ineligible to citizenship,” effectively targeting Asian immigrants who were barred from naturalization under federal law. Later iterations of the law focused even more directly on Japanese immigrants, further restricting their ability to lease or even hold land through their American-born children.

The question I had was: if the laws in Washington forbade Chinese and Japanese families from owning land, how did they operate businesses in Olympia during this era? The Olympia Historical Society points out that dozens of businesses across Olympia were operated by Asian families, though apparently not controlling the land underneath the businesses.

One method involved leveraging their U.S.-born children, which leads us into a reflection on today’s debates about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.

Washington State’s Alien Land Laws initially targeted non-citizen land ownership, focusing primarily on Chinese and later Japanese immigrants. While the original laws didn’t explicitly address land ownership by the U.S.-born children of these immigrants—who were birthright citizens under the 14th Amendment, a loophole soon emerged. Families began purchasing land in their children’s names, allowing parents barred from owning property to indirectly control it through their citizen offspring.

In response, the legislature passed additional laws, notably in 1923, specifically stating that land held in the name of a child of an ineligible alien would be considered held in trust for the parent, effectively closing the loophole. In 1925, the Washington State Supreme Court case State v. Hirabayashi reinforced this interpretation, ruling against the transfer of land-holding stock to second-generation Japanese American children when their parents retained control, deeming it an evasion of the Alien Land Law.

This situation created a direct conflict with the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. While the 14th Amendment unequivocally granted citizenship to those born within the United States, the Alien Land Laws limited the practical benefits of that citizenship, especially the right to own and control property. It highlighted the tension between the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship and state-level efforts to maintain racial discrimination.

This history dovetails with contemporary legal battles surrounding birthright citizenship, particularly efforts by the Trump administration to reinterpret the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Just as past lawmakers sought to create exceptions to citizenship rights based on parental status, current arguments attempt to carve out similar exceptions, revealing a recurring tension between constitutional principles and efforts to impose discriminatory limitations.

So Where Does That Leave Us in Olympia?

Who did own the land underneath those businesses?

What I was trying to find out was who the non-Asian families were who supported Asian-owned businesses by leasing or renting land to them. The real research (narrowing it down through property records on microfilm) will take some time. I’ll get to that eventually. For now, I’m content just sketching out the context.

Leasing or renting to Asian families did not escape the notice or ire of Olympia’s more racist white residents. From an Olympia Tribune editorial in the 1890s, we see a call for the expulsion of Chinese residents by legal means, especially by encouraging property owners to refuse to rent to them. The editorial reflects widespread fears among white laborers about job competition and portrays the Chinese community as an unwanted and growing threat. It even calls for the creation of a citizens’ association to coordinate exclusion efforts, promoting the motto: “Olympia for Olympians.”

From a separate, sympathetic article about the populist “People’s Party,” also from the 1890s: “We believe that those who patronize the Chinese are enemies of their white brethren, and we favor strict exclusion and entire letting alone of all Chinese and their sympathizers.”

When I poked around the same newspaper archives looking for records of who owned the land underneath Asian-owned businesses, I came up short. I can only assume that while business relationships were practical and necessary, they were considered perilous enough that few people talked about them openly.

The land owned by Sam Fun Locke’s family at the corner of Columbia and 5th is a good example of this land record puzzle. Locke was one of Olympia’s most successful Chinese businessmen, often called “The Mayor of Chinatown.” After his death, the property was passed along to his descendants. I can pick up the property transfers starting in the 1940s but can’t trace anything definitive before that.

I can, however, track the locations of his businesses through phone directory records, which makes it possible to compare them with land ownership records. That way, I could eventually find out when exactly Locke’s family came into possession of the land, and whether the same family owned it while Locke operated his business there.

So, there’s still more work to do. But this week, at least, I was able to lay out the policy and legal landscape before diving deeper.

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