February 8th: Day 3

“Labor will feed the people.”

“No One Knows Where” editorial by Anna Louise Strong, Seattle Union Record, February 4, 1919.
Seattle Union Record (Seattle, WA). University of Washington Libraries Microforms & Newspapers.

By day three, momentum felt by the strikers began to wane, with some workers, such as the streetcar operators, returning to work that weekend. The Seattle Union Record also resumed publication on Saturday, realizing a need for pro-labor coverage to counter the anti-strike narrative espoused by the mainstream press. Later that day, the Executive Committee also attempted to pass a resolution at a meeting of the General Strike Committee, calling for an immediate end to the strike. The more radical faction of the strike committee resisted this call, and after hours of debate, the resolution did not pass and the strike would continue.

As Anna Louise Strong states in her famous editorial in the February 4th issue of the Seattle Union Record, on display in this case, “No one knows where” the strike would take them. Some posit that the decline in the strike’s momentum could be attributed to this lack of vision for what the strike would achieve beyond the initial demands of the striking shipyard workers, especially once it became clear the general strike did not have revolutionary intent. However, Strong’s editorial also highlights what makes the strike such a powerful representation of worker power. Through the coordination of strike kitchens, milk stations, and co-operative bakeries, the Seattle General Strike demonstrated that the working class could shut down capitalist industry while effectively and efficiently caring for themselves.

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