Two days ago, Jonah and I watched a film entitled, "Lewis County: Hope and Struggle"made by my old professor, Anne Fischel, about the Wobbly wars in Centralia, Washington.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies is a radical, labor organization that fights to improve the living standards of the working class. The IWW had set up an office in Centralia, Washington to organize the labor forces, specifically focusing on the logging industry. Their office was first attacked and destroyed during a Memorial Day Parade in 1918, where IWW members and workers were beaten and told to leave Centralia. However, the Wobblies were determined to stay and continue organizing and were able to open a new office. The next year, during the Armistice Day parade, the IWW office was attacked again, but this time the Wobblies were prepared to defend their rights and property. Four men who were under the American Legion were shot and killed by the IWW members as they tried to attack the office. Wesley Everest, who was one of the armed IWW members defending his property, ran out of the building as he was chased by a mob. He shot and killed one attacker before being caught, beaten and dragged by the neck to the jail. Later that night, all power went out in Centralia and in the dark of the night, Everest was taken from jail and by vigilantes and hung by the neck from a bridge (now known as Hangman’s Bridge). Everest was castrated and his body was shot twenty times and then left hanging. The body was left here into the next morning, where young children had to walk by it to get to school. Later on, his body was thrown back into the jail for the other jailed Wobblies to observe for two days. Local officials refused to bury Everest, wanting nothing to do with him, so the task fell on four prisoners to carry his body to the graveyard where they had to bury Everest in an unmarked grave in the pauper’s section while the National Guard was watching. The other Wobblies that were jailed were accused of murder and put through an unjust trial that consisted of lies, intimidation of witnesses and suppression of evidence. There are later reports from the jury saying that their guilty-verdict was a mistake, but that there was so much pressure on them that there could not have been any other verdict besides guilty.
This story is just one side of the whole picture. For many who grew up in the region, all of the blame of the massacre is placed on the Wobblies, rather than the Legionnaires. I wanted to tell the side of the story that had been suppressed throughout history, one that you would not know until digging a little deeper. In the center of Centralia, in front of the public library, there is a square that has a “Freedom Walk” that memorializes the four Legionnaires that died that day in 1919. Nowhere is there any information about the Wobblies, their side of the story remains untold. However, in 1997, a mural entitled, “The Resurrection of Wesley Everest” was designed and painted by Mike Alewitz, a member of the IWW, with the help from members of the community. The mural is located on top of a building that looks over the “Freedom Walk.” Finally, both stories are told. We were allowed up on top of the building to take a closer look.
Thanks for this post. I first read about Wesley Everest and the Centralia conflict in Greil Marcus' book 'The Shape of Things to Come' (FSG 2006). In a chapter about the novelist Philip Roth, Marcus discusses John Dos Passos and Dos Passos's monumental trilogy U.S.A. in which the story of Everest's death is retold. Marcus' book includes passages written by Justice William O. Douglas who, as a young man of twenty-one, read accounts of Centralia in the local Yakima papers. Douglas later came to realize that the Centralia incident exemplified America at its worst and least just. I wonder at the memories of those children walking to school underneath the bridge viewing Everest's body.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, thanks for the post.
You don't have to dig far to find a relatively IWW-friendly version of the story. Read The Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies by Tom Copeland (Published 1993 by the University of Washington press). It provides a pretty even-handed account of the massacre--an account that places the majority of the blame on the legionnaires as the aggressors--and it does so in much clearer terms than the mural.
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