The deportation crusade began in Seattle late in 1917. The country was at war, an unpopular war, and there was an unsettled timber strike in the woods of western Washington. The city was awash with migrant workers – most of them loggers, sheltering from the winter rains. The wartime strike wave continued unabated; from Russia, the news was foreboding. There were whispers of revolution everywhere.

Desperate, the city’s embattled employers joined the lumbermen in begging for federal intervention. This had been withheld in the first years of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, but in 1917, they would get it – a scheme to deport en masse “alien radicals.” The suppression of working-class radicalism didn’t begin in Seattle, but the deportations did, taking repression to a new level. Arbitrary and ruthless in its application, Seattle’s campaign would become a model for the better-known crusades to come – the “Red Scare” and US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s national raids of 1919-1920.

Seattle was a boom town in the 1910s; its shipyards, waterfront and monopoly of the Alaska trade outpaced all else on the Pacific Coast. Seattle was also the center of radicalism in the Pacific Northwest. In a surging economy, its powerful labor movement was led by socialists. Eugene Debs, best-known socialist of the times, reckoned Washington to be the first state to “go socialist.” It didn’t, but in 1919 Seattle was the site of the great General Strike, five days in February when workers and their unions ran the city and “nothing moved but the tide.” The authorities were reduced to observers.

Seattle was also the western home to the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). The IWW was, if not the largest, the best known of the radical organizations of the day. In the years since its founding in Chicago in 1905, the IWW had migrated westward; its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, was published in Seattle. Its base increasingly was in the hard-rock miners, the wheatfield hands, and, in the Northwest, the loggers in the vast coastal forests. The Wobbly’s syndicalist views were in themselves enough to frighten the cities well-to-do. But more, the Wobblies seemed capable of turning almost any grievance into a strike if not a rebellion. Then came the war – a war the Wobblies opposed, as did the majority of Seattle’s workers. Overnight, they were redefined as traitors; “aliens” and Wobblies – the terms became synonymous. They were to be got rid of, now targeted by a vengeful administration in the other Washington.

In winter, the loggers, men and boys, in their hundreds if not thousands, left their camps for to the bleak mill towns of the Puget Sound country, but above all they came to Seattle. There they frequented the bars, brothels and flop houses, where they revisited their great........

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