Spokane Below My Wings, Lost in Smoke, All Ashes

The plane took off from SeaTac airport, climbing steeply, banking to the east, headed for Baltimore. I did not have a window seat, yet I could see through the starboard cabin window snowy Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, awesome volcanic peaks that sometimes erupt like Mount Saint Helens did in 1980.

“We must be flying above Ellensburg by now,” my fellow passenger in the window seat said. “But the smoke is so thick, I can’t see anything. No Ellensburg. No Columbia River. Just smoke.” Even from my aisle seat I could see far to the southern horizon, Oregon, Idaho, California, Utah, all engulfed in a blanket of dense smoke from runaway wildfires.

Half an hour later, we must have been flying over Spokane, although we saw only smoke below us. We had just been reading about the “Old Trails” wildfire that destroyed 560 homes in the suburbs of Spokane, each of these dwellings valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars, even a million dollars or more.

I was one of a thousand delegates, alternates, and guests who attended the Washington State Democratic Convention, June 20-21, staying in a hotel right on the banks of the Spokane River. We all cheered Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) calling on all of us to join in the nationwide get-out-the-vote drive to oust the MAGA Republican extremists in the midterm elections Nov. 3, Representatives and Senators who serve the oil and gas corporations. These lawmakers support Trump’s wars on Venezuela, Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon, that reap trillions in fossil fuel profits that heat the planet, turn forests tinder dry, and ignite the fires that make planet Earth uninhabitable.

As a student at the University of Washington in the 1960s, I had friends from Spokane who knew and loved the great African American lawyer and peace and justice activist, Carl Maxey. In his memory, there is a “Carl Maxey Center” in Spokane today, fighting back against all forms of racist and sexist oppression in the “Inland Empire.”

In the spring of 2000, my dad and I drove over to Spokane to cover an infamous lockout of the union steelworkers at the Kaiser Aluminum complex at two towns just north of the city, Trentwood with an aluminum rolling mill employing about 1,000 workers, and the neighboring town of Mead, where an aluminum smelter employed about 1,000 workers. Henry J. Kaiser is remembered as an “enlightened” CEO who bargained with his shipyard, steel, and aluminum workers. But after he died, Kaiser’s enterprises were taken over by a gang of corporate cutthroats whose obsession was maximum profits -- the workers, their union, and community be damned.

These gangsters brought in permanent strikebreakers, housed in barracks surrounded by high chainlink fences --scabs kept like prison inmates with the sole aim of busting the United Steelworkers Local 338. The new union busting management instigated measures so extreme the workers went out on strike September 30, 1998. In 1999, still refusing to bargain at plants in

Washington State, Ohio, and Louisiana, Kaiser turned it into an illegal lockout.

Finally, a settlement was reached October 23, 2000. Ultimately, the USWA filed a lawsuit and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled against Kaiser, ordering them to pay the workers more than seven million dollars in damages. Even so, it came at a huge cost for the workers. Kaiser permanently closed down the aluminum smelter in Mead, destroying a plant that employed as many as 1,000 workers. Only the Trentwood rolling mill remains today, still employing about 1,000 workers represented by USWA Local 338. Well over half the aluminum in the United States is manufactured in Washington State because electrolysis is at the heart of turning bauxite into aluminum. The hydroelectric power generated by the Bonneville Power Administration’s dams on the Columbia River is the key to Washington’s aluminum production.

Spokane holds other memories. In November, 1909, the Free Speech Movement led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) erupted in Spokane. Jobless workers, also known as “hoboes,”“vagabonds,” and “bindlestiffs,” rose in mass street protests against a racket by employment agencies in Spokane that charged the homeless, starving workers a dollar for a job as a logger or farmworker for one or two days. The employer would squeeze as much labor as he could at starvation wages, then fire the worker who was forced to return to the employment agency that charged him another dollar. It was a “vicious circle” for every homeless, toiling bindlestiff.

The IWW decided to organize these workers. They staged mass street rallies with the workers, standing on soap boxes to denounce this giant swindle. The rallies became bigger and bigger. Finally, the Spokane City Council enacted a statute outlawing public speaking. IWW responded by calling for “Wobblies” to come from all over the nation to join in the “Free Speech Movement." The Spokane jail was jam-packed, so full that the US Army came to the rescue, allowing the arrestees to be incarcerated at the local military base.

Among the most powerful speakers to come to Spokane to speak was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, then an IWW organizer, one of the most effective leaders of garment and textile worker strikes in Passaic, NJ, and Lawrence, Mass. She delivered one of her fiery orations and was arrested. When she was released, she stepped up onto the soapbox again and denounced the filthy, overcrowded, Spokane jail. The male police officers who ran the women’s wing of the jail had turned it into a brothel, Gurley Flynn said.

The public support for the Free Speech Movement became so powerful that the Spokane City Council repealed the ban on public speaking -- a victory for freedom of speech and also for the right of workers to organize.

These were my thoughts of Spokane as we flew above the incinerated houses in Old Trails. Spokane must be rebuilt! We can’t afford to squander $1 billion each day of our tax dollars on Trump’s illegal war against Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, when our cities and towns are being destroyed by wildfires and corporate shutdowns.