47. Amnesia
Last October, I was pawing through a trove of boxes at the University of Washington Special Collections, pretty certain I knew what I was looking for. I had arrived to do research into the Silver Shirts — the pro-fascist, anti-semitic militia group of the 1930s — for a story I’d pitched to High Country News. Despite being founded by an easterner named William Dudley Pelley, the Silver Shirts found a lot of popularity in Washington state. Washington would be the only state to put Pelley on the ballot when he ran for President of the United States, as a Christian Party candidate, in 1936.
For a couple of days, I dove into reading the prolific writings of Pelley in the masses of newspapers1, magazines and books he put out over the years. The man had a lot to say, and almost all of it was wildly anti-semitic or conspiratorial. To be honest, I felt sick reading so much of it, thinking about how much garbage he put into the world, and how much of it is still around today.
The more I sat with Pelley’s writings, the more mentions I saw of labor organizing in the state. His words dripped with scorn over the strikes of dockworkers in Seattle, and at timber operations in Aberdeen and Hoquiam. In one “article,” Pelley writes of speaking to a crowd in Centralia about a 1919 incident there, which he characterized as a bloodbath after members of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union “fired upon” a peaceful veteran’s parade, killing several. Since I couldn’t trust a word in his publications, I got very curious about what he was referring to; I hadn’t heard of it.
My research into Pelley and the Silver Shirts was derailed by learning more about what happened in Centralia, and I found myself sucked up into a book by historian Tom Copeland, called The Centralia Tragedy of 1919, about what happened there.
It wasn’t long after that I let my editors know that I found a more interesting story than the one I’d originally pitched. It took me a very long time for the story to come together, but it finally did — and the magazine published the final product this week, called “The Tragedy of Centralia.” Here’s an excerpt:
A look at the history of Centralia and the wider region shows that ideological extremism has century-old roots here. In 1919, a group of veterans attacked a labor union hall, and five people died in the aftermath. Locals celebrated the instigators as patriots and the unionists as anti-American troublemakers who deserved their fate — and that story has persisted for a hundred years.
At a moment when diverging narratives have become central to debates over the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot — not to mention the 2024 presidential election — Centralia’s history shows what happens when a community indulges in historical amnesia. By distorting truth and turning a blind eye to facts, Centralia helped smooth the way for modern-day bigotry. It is a test case, illustrating how easily extremism can find a permanent home. Casting minority voices as outsiders provides a convenient scapegoat — a shared enemy to be feared and shunned and fought. And it reinforces just how true it is that history repeats itself.
I want to talk about the double-meaning of the word “tragedy” in the headline.
The first meaning is literal. What happened in November 1919 — an incident that left five men dead — is a true Northwest tragedy where one of the victims has been forgotten entirely. That fifth man was a laborer who was lynched from a bridge by a mob, whose fingerprints I found in a file folder in a backroom of the local historical society (see above), away from the public. The only true remembrances of Wesley Everest in Centralia are a partially-obscured mural2, and his gravestone. For my story, I spoke at length with Mike Garrison, of the IWW, about his efforts to not only memorialize Everest with a plaque in downtown Centralia, but also get local people to start referring to the event as the “Centralia Tragedy,” not the “Centralia Massacre,” as it is more commonly known.
The more I reported, the more people told me was that the lynch mob who killed Everest had been comprised of local citizens and leaders, but there had been an agreement in Centralia to never unmask the people who killed the man, to never talk about it. By agreeing to this code of silence, the city agreed to engage in historical amnesia.
That willful forgetting worked to their benefit.
In 1997, when the mural of Everest was being painted, a local man wrote into the local newspaper, admitting “I have no idea what actually happened” in 1919. Without anything to back it up on, he likened the mural to “a blatant display of bankrupt communist ideology.” I laughed out loud when I saw that letter — a bold admission: “I have no clue what I’m talking about, but here’s my authoritative opinion anyway!”
The second meaning of the headline on the story I wrote, I think, is that Centralia is one of the many small cities in the Northwest where aspects of public life have been crowded out by people with extremist agendas — from a local county commissioner, to the store affiliated with a whites-only religion on Tower Avenue, to that ridiculous Uncle Sam billboard on Interstate 5. As one local man, Kyle Wheeler, told me in our interviews: Extremism is “not just tolerated. It's almost expected that that is the baseline,” he said. “And when you're not at that extremist baseline, it's a little bit concerning. It moves the spectrum of what is defined as an extremist out here when the John Birch Society is your base level. That's normal.”
And that is a tragedy. Through my reporting I met wonderful, inspiring people rejecting the bigotry with deep, deep roots — roots that go back to that 1919 incident, to the Silver Shirts, to KKK cross burnings and the John Birch Society. To the hyper-nationalistic patriotism that was normalized by the American Legion.
Extremism is “not just tolerated. It's almost expected that that is the baseline,” he said. “And when you're not at that extremist baseline, it's a little bit concerning. It moves the spectrum of what is defined as an extremist out here when the John Birch Society is your base level. That's normal.”
The story was wildly illuminating for me to report3, from how the patriotic image of the logger was created by the government after World War I in reaction to labor unrest in timber camps impacted the war effort.4 I learned how the federal government created a union called the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, and how the IWW of 1919 were discussed in the same tone that anti-fascists are today.
I learned how the word “Communist” — which Donald Trump has been throwing around lately — is generations-old shorthand that signifies “any anti-American boogeyman, like a cuss word lumping together every outsider.”
Even if you have no familiarity with Centralia, Washington, I hope you read this story and come away with a more nuanced understanding of how a community creates a permissive culture for extremism to thrive. Part of the way that happens is to insiders and outsiders, and to willingly try to forget the full picture of our history. And I think that’s instructive for all of us.
A few more notes:
As you likely saw in the news, Chad Daybell — who is at the center of my book When the Moon Turns to Blood — was sentenced to death by a jury for the murders of his wife, Tammy Daybell, and Lori Vallow’s children, Tylee Ryan and JJ Vallow. It was a wild conclusion to a years-long ordeal. And Lori Vallow’s saga only continues this summer, when she is set to go on trial in Arizona for a variety of murder charges there.
I’m delighted to have been asked to be the Smith Pettit lecturer at this year’s Sunstone Symposium, on August 1 in Salt Lake City. If you’re in the area, come on out and say hello.
Oh, and in case you missed this announcement:
They masquerade as newspapers, but if you read them, Pelley or his Silver Legion organizers are really the only people ever interviewed and every “article” is just a rant about Jews.
The mural, called “The Resurrection of Wesley Everest,” is a really interesting piece of art by Mike Alewitz. If you’d like to see a chart of what all the symbolism is — it’s the only public art I can think of that features “an ugly human spewing fecal matter from his mouth” — The Chronicle has a great guide to it.
An early draft of the story I sent to my editors, McKenna Stayner and Emily Benson, was over 9,000 words. Sorry!
I understand how conspiratorial this sounds! Just read the story!
I spent a lot of time in my younger years growing up in the Seattle area, I had never heard this history. Thanks for digging it up. I've sent your email to some PNW friends and family. Looking forward to your finished work.
BTW, have you ever read Robert Caro's series of LBJ biographies? He spends considerable time on the concerted effort to conflate the labor movement with Communism and anti-Christian, atheistic beliefs. It was diabolical. It's also a fascinating tale within a tale, which is, to me a major part of Caro's appeal and style as a chronicler of history.
The book sounds awesome!