author
Walker C. Smith
A fiery labor writer and Industrial Workers of the World organizer, this early 20th-century radical turned strikes, arrests, and free-speech fights into urgent, first-hand history. His best-known work captures the human cost of class conflict in the Pacific Northwest.
1 Audiobook
The Everett Massacre: A history of the class struggle in the lumber industry
by Walker C. Smith
About the author
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1885, Walker C. Smith became a prominent member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the union better known as the Wobblies. Reliable historical sources describe him as a writer, editor, speaker, and organizer who produced socialist newspapers, pamphlets, satirical plays, and verse while traveling widely to promote the union's cause.
He is best remembered for The Everett Massacre, his account of the 1916 violence in Everett, Washington, written from the viewpoint of labor struggle and free-speech battles in the lumber industry. Sources also note that he was frequently arrested because authorities regarded him as a leading IWW agitator, which gives his writing the feel of lived experience rather than distant commentary.
Smith died in 1927. Today, his work remains of interest to readers drawn to labor history, radical politics, and vivid firsthand writing from one of the most turbulent periods of American industrial conflict.