The Everett Massacre — remembered by the Industrial Workers of the World as "Bloody Sunday" — was the deadliest labor confrontation in Pacific Northwest history. On November 5, 1916, some 250 Wobblies boarded the passenger steamer Verona in Seattle and sailed north to Everett, Washington, to assert their right to speak on the city’s streets in support of striking shingle weavers. Waiting for them at the city dock were Snohomish County sheriff Donald McRae and roughly 200 armed citizen deputies. When the boat drew in, gunfire erupted; in the space of about ten minutes at least five Wobblies and two deputies were killed and more than thirty people were wounded.
The clash grew out of a long, bitter free-speech fight. Everett’s shingle weavers had been on strike since the spring of 1916, and the IWW had come to the city to organize and to defend the right to soapbox on street corners — a right local authorities were determined to deny. Wobblies who traveled to Everett were repeatedly arrested, jailed, and run out of town. On October 30, 1916, a group of forty-one IWW members was seized, taken to Beverly Park on the edge of the city, and forced to run a gauntlet where deputies beat them with clubs and gun butts. The Sunday sailing of the Verona was the union’s answer to that violence.
As the Verona came alongside the Everett dock, Sheriff McRae called out that the Wobblies could not land. A shot rang out — each side blamed the other — and the deputies opened fire on the crowded steamer. Panicked passengers rushed to the far rail, listing the boat so severely that men were thrown into the frigid water; an unknown number drowned and were never recovered. Five Wobblies were confirmed dead: Felix Baran, Hugo Gerlot, Gustav Johnson, John Looney, and Abraham Rabinowitz. Deputies Jefferson Beard and Charles Curtis were also killed, most likely by the crossfire of their own side. Dozens more, on the boat and on the dock, were wounded.
When the Verona limped back to Seattle it was met by police, and 74 IWW members were arrested and charged with the first-degree murder of deputy Jefferson Beard. Thomas H. Tracy was selected to be tried first, in a closely watched trial in Seattle. On May 5, 1917, the jury acquitted him, and the charges against the remaining Everett defendants were dropped. The men who had been held for months in the Snohomish County jail were freed. The massacre became one of the defining martyrdom stories of the American labor movement — commemorated in Wobbly songs, pamphlets, and memory ever since.
