Biography
Walker C. Smith was an IWW propagandist, writer and editor of the Spokane-based Industrial Worker from about February 1912 to July 1913. He wrote extensively on sabotage, direct action, militarism and industrial unionism, including the pamphlets Sabotage: Its History, Philosophy and Function and The Everett Massacre — the contemporary account of the 1916 killings that this database's Everett records draw on.
During the Seattle General Strike of February 6 to 11, 1919, police arrested Smith in a roundup of radicals and IWW members, one report associating the arrest with distributing or possessing a pamphlet on revolutionary Russia. He was among roughly thirty-one people taken into custody in the strike-era crackdown, and was closely associated with the Equity Printing Company, the IWW-connected Seattle print shop that police closed in the post-strike repression. No conviction is documented; the prosecution appears to have ended without trial. Much of his personal life, including his vital dates, remains unestablished.
