On November 2, 1909, a man climbed onto an overturned crate in downtown Spokane, said "Friends and fellow workers," and was pulled down by the police before he could say much more. Another took his place, and another. By the end of the day 103 people had been arrested, and within a month more than five hundred. Being arrested was the point.
A dollar a job
Stevens Street was lined with employment agencies selling work in the logging camps and on construction crews to the migrant men who wintered in Spokane. A job cost a dollar. The employer might keep a man a day or two, let him go, and take another from the same agency, which sold the place again. The men called the agencies sharks.
James Walsh of the Industrial Workers of the World arrived in the fall of 1908 to find two or three thousand angry workers in the streets, and once talked a crowd out of wrecking an agency by telling them to join the union instead. The IWW opened a hall with a library and started a newspaper, the Industrial Worker, and its speakers worked the street corners. The agencies asked the city council for a ban on speaking in the streets, which took effect on January 1, 1909; the mayor, a wholesale lumberman, raised no objection. That August the council exempted the Salvation Army.
Filling the jails
In the fall the Industrial Worker called on members everywhere to come to Spokane and be arrested, and they came on freight trains from the camps and the harvest fields. No one needed to be an orator, since no one got past the first sentence; the story goes that one volunteer, finding no policeman at hand, stood on the box and shouted for the cops. The city jail filled, and the city turned an abandoned, condemned school, the Franklin, into a second one. When that filled, the War Department lent Fort Wright, the army post named for the colonel who had hanged Qualchan on Latah Creek half a century before. Prisoners came into court matted with blood.
The Rebel Girl
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was nineteen, pregnant, and fresh from a free-speech fight in Missoula when she reached Spokane. She chained herself to a post so the police could not pull her down at once. Once arrested, she wrote up the city jail for the Industrial Worker: the filth, the crowding, and the charge that the women's section was being run as a brothel with police finding the customers. The police tried to destroy every copy of the December 10 issue that carried it. Eight editors had already been arrested one after another, and the paper moved to Seattle to keep printing. A jury acquitted her.
March 4, 1910
The arrests, the bills, the bad national press and a boycott of Spokane merchants by men in the camps wore the city down. When prisoners were marched through the streets to bathe, people threw them tobacco and fruit. The Spokane Press, women's clubs, craft unions and socialists came around to the Wobblies' side. On March 3 a three-man IWW committee sat down with the mayor and city officials, and on March 4, 1910, the ordinance was revoked and the prisoners released. Before long the city had pulled the licenses of nineteen employment agencies, and employers began hiring men directly.
Later IWW free-speech fights, at Fresno in 1910 and San Diego in 1912, took Spokane as their pattern.