:Class and Gender Politics in Progressive-Era Seattle.(The Urban West Series.)

Abstract

This book is a welcome addition to the literature on Progressive politics in the American West. John C. Putman makes several important and often overlooked points about the West during this period. First, the romanticized version of the “Wild West” obscures the extent to which the phenomena of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration rapidly transformed the region in the late nineteenth century, leading to many of the same problems that affected the eastern United States during this time. Second, the labor movement was actively involved in Progressive-era reform, not simply the target of middle-class reformers worried about potential working-class radicalism. Third, working-class women stood at the intersection between the labor and women's movements and were active in reform measures that affected both populations. Putnam's study does a great service in providing a detailed case study of these developments in the city of Seattle, Washington. The book's five chapters recount the early history of Seattle, working-class political activity, two chapters on gender politics (one focused on the successful woman suffrage campaign of 1910 and the other on the female post-suffrage activism), while the final chapter concentrates on the years just before World War I. Putnam argues that vigorous early political activity by working-class people and women helped define the political environment of the city, but that growing concerns about labor radicalism thwarted many of their initiatives, especially in the final years of the study. His discussion begins with anti-Chinese agitation followed by repeated episodes in which working-class political alliances and parties confronted middle-class “law and order” or “good government” groups who accused their opponents of radical and violent tendencies. These were not simply conservative reactionaries; they were often labor's erstwhile Progressive allies. To a certain degree the Seattle labor movement was influenced by radicals, socialists, and the Socialist Labor Party in the late nineteenth century, and by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) after 1905. As Putnam reminds us, the labor movement was not a unified group. There were major differences between a large group of usually unskilled, often transient, and predominantly male workers and more settled skilled craftsmen who tended to be more politically moderate and worried that radicalism could be used to discredit the labor movement as a whole—which it was.