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The Red Coast: Radicalism and Antiradicalism in Southwest Washington by Aaron Goings, Brian Barnes, and Roger Snider

2020; Oregon Historical Society; Volume: 121; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ohq.2020.0027

2329-3780

Aaron Jesch,

Race, History, and American Society

229 Reviews A particularly interesting chapter examines the tension among radical women, employers, and middle-class progressives in the 1913 Oregon Packing Strike. The women workers, who walked off the job when the company rejected their demand for higher wages, were supported by the local IWW, which provided security and financial assistance to the strikers . Progressive reformers on the Oregon Industrial Welfare Commission also intervened and attempted to negotiate a settlement on behalf of the women. Progressives feared that the involvement of male Wobblies with the striking women might encourage prostitution , or “white slavery.” But at a moment when progressives were preoccupied by anxiety about prostitution, striking women shifted the moral responsibility for women’s undertaking that work to the “pimps” at the company who failed to pay a living wage (p. 83). Progressives sought to enforce their own vision of fairness and morality on both strikers and employers. The radical women wanted to control their own economic and moral destiny, and they saw Wobbly radicalism, not progressive reform, as the best means of achieving their goal. Beyond the Rebel Girl is an important contribution to the field, and it should find a home on many college syllabi. Its scope and arguments are novel enough to merit assignment to graduate students, but its clear prose, straightforward style, and modest length also make it highly accessible to undergraduate and general readers. It also deserves credit for its choice of photographs, all of which buttress the author’s thesis of a radical movement with deep roots in local communities. Among the most powerful of these photos are a sea of men, women, and children at an IWW memorial for victims of the Everett Massacre; a small girl, Katie Phar, smiling while holding a Wobbly pennant; a row of boys, aged eight to sixteen, arrested for distributing Wobbly papers; and Dr. Marie Equi, Wobbly ally and reproductive rights advocate, in a curious pose while imprisoned in San Quentin for sedition. Brian Barnes Saint Martin’s University THE RED COAST: RADICALISM AND ANTIRADICALISM IN SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON by Aaron Goings, Brian Barnes, and Roger Snider Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2019. Illustrations, notes, bibliography index. 236 pages. $24.95 paper. Aaron Goings, Brian Barnes, and Roger Snider’s The Red Coast explores the history of Wobblies (members of Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW), socialists, and communists in southwest Washington, focusing on the back-and-forth struggle between radical laborers and their capitalist bosses who used the levers of the state to maintain control of their workforce. Employers and state authorities frequently attacked the region’s radical working-class immigrants with raids, destruction of records and meeting halls, and mob violence. The Red Coast shows the ebb and flow of labor radicalism followed by anti-labor reaction, from the labor wars of the 1910s to the anti-labor efforts of the government and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) during the 1920s to renewed anti-Communist hostility during the 1930s Great Depression. It also explores the intersections of class, gender, ethnicity, and race in an era when much of the region’s bosses were White men who united to assert themselves as the rightful leaders of American society. While most scholarship on Pacific Coast radical labor discusses the role of male wage earners, this book contributes important new material about how women also engaged in the class struggle that shaped their lives and the region’s history. Using an array of sources, including local newspapers and union publications as well as court and police records, The Red Coast explores the lesser-known areas of radicalism in southwest Washington, such as Aberdeen, as well as more famous events, such as the tragedy in Centralia. Starting with the gillnet wars of the 1880s and 1890s, it reveals how the Columbia River Fisherman’s Protective Union came together to improve the conditions of local gillnetters. The authors highlight the role 230 OHQ vol. 121, no. 2 of women, especially Finns, on the front lines of the labor wars and class struggles of the early twentiethcentury.TheyarguethatRedFinn,IWW, and Socialist halls were critical meeting places for immigrants and laborers in their struggle against their capitalist bosses...