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Murray C. Morgan
George Cotterill, Hiram Gill and the Potlatch Riots
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Copyright, 1960, Murray Morgan
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George Cotterill, Hiram
Gill and the Potlatch Riots
 In
the election of 1912 the [Seattle] voters had a clear cut choice
between good and evil-at the very least, between a closed town and
an open town: Hiram Gill versus George Cotterill.
Cotterill
was a solidly built, youngish civil engineer of forty-seven, a
politician of liberal-reformist kidney. He had served as assistant
city engineer under that cross-grained genius Reginald H. Thomson,
and had helped to formulate the plans for reconstructing the
water-supply system of Seattle and the topography of part of Puget
Sound.
Though
Cotterill's first political leanings had been Republican (he came
to Seattle from England by way of New Jersey), he became disgusted
with the local GOP because, as the dominant party, it was being
wooed and won by open-town advocates. William Jennings Bryan's
cross-of-gold oration won Cotterill for the Democrats, and he
usually supported them, though he had nothing against Populists,
Silver Republicans, and Bull Moosers.
In
1902 Cotterill ran against Tom Humes, "a race for principle,
not for office," he later called it. In 1912 the reform
element picked him to try again. This time Cotterill made it,
defeating Gill, to the disgust of the Times.
Colonel
Blethen was in a pet. All the sacred orthodoxies were being
overthrown. The direct primary ended the party-convention system,
and candidates in city elections ran without the official backing
of political parties. Women had suffrage. The reformers captured
the city government.
The
state not only cast its seven electoral votes for the Progressives
in 1912 but the Republicans finished third, far behind the
Democrats and a bare thirty thousand votes ahead of the despised
Socialists. The Colonel got the Wobbly Horrors.
The
Wobblies--the Industrial Workers of the World--were active in
Seattle. Every night their speakers mounted soapboxes along the
Skid Road and sometimes in the business district-even in front of
the Times Building.
One
spring afternoon in 1912 they marched through town in a parade,
the red flag flying next to the Stars and Stripes. The police
didn't stop them, but the crowd did. There was a small riot as
spectators fought the Wobblies for possession of the red flag.
From that time on Blethen campaigned against Mayor Cotterill on
the issue of "red-flag anarchy."
Blethen
contended that the mayor, by permitting the Wobblies to talk, was
endangering the safety of the community; he argued that, law or no
law, the Wobblies should be suppressed; permitting them to carry
on their activities was not liberty but license.
Cotterill
believed that to deny someone the right to speak or to carry a
banner when no law prohibited such speeches or banners was "to
evade the rule of law and was therefore no way to suppress
anarchy. Indeed, such actions would be anarchy."
The
dispute came to a climax on a sultry August evening in 1913
Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy, had been invited to
Seattle to speak as part of the Potlatch Days celebration, a
jamboree arranged to draw visitors to town during the dog days.
After being introduced by Mayor Cotterill to the dignitaries
assembled at the ultra-respectable Rainier Club, Daniels made a
routine patriotic address, a set speech he had delivered some
weeks before in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Most
of the men present were political opponents of the city
administration and they cheered with unusual fervor when Daniels
spread the eagle.
While
the business community was demonstrating its sympathies at the
Club, Mrs. Annie Miller, a pacifist, delivered a speech to a Skid
Road crowd from a portable platform she set up on Occidental near
Washington Street. As she talked a trio of sailors on leave from
Whidbey Island joined the crowd. They heckled the speaker, and she
in turn called them drones and burdens on the working class.
The
crowd was pro-Miller. When she left the stand, one of the sailors
mounted it and made a speech too, probably just as patriotic as
the speech delivered by the Secretary of the Navy, but it was
received with jeers. After a while Mrs. Miller tried to get her
stand back from the sailors; it was rented, she said, and if she
didn't return it now she'd have to pay overtime. A sailor told her
to shut up and raised his fist.
Then,
according to the sworn statement of several witnesses, "a
large well-dressed man, with a diamond ring, who bore no
resemblance to the typical IWW, broke in. 'You would strike a
woman!' he shouted, and struck the sailor with his fist a number
of times."
Some
soldiers rushed to the support of the Navy. The military were
roughed up thoroughly before the police came to their rescue.
Three of the men were treated at the hospital, but all were
released in time to make it back to their stations. Up to this
point it was just another street-corner brawl, but then M. M.
Mattison, the political reporter for the Times, went to work on
it. He gave his story the full political treatment:
Practically at the
very moment a gang of red-flag worshippers and anarchists were
brutally beating two bluejackets and three soldiers who had dared
protest against the insults heaped on the American flag at a
soap-box meeting on Washington Street last night, Secretary of the
Navy Daniels, cheered on by the wildly enthusiastic and patriotic
Americans present, rayed as a type the mayor of any city who
permits red-flag demonstrations in a community of which he is the
head.
Warming to his topic,
the Secretary proceeded with a merciless denunciation of the
cowardly un-American, who, occupying the highest position in the
gift of an American city, fosters anarchy in the streets by
permitting the display of the red flag and the demonstrations of
its adherents.
After
reporting a version of the street fight in which Mrs. Miller was
described as an IWW and was accused of swearing at the sailors and
insulting the flag, Mattison closed his account with a series of
quotes:
"The
participants in last night's outrage ought to be rounded up and
driven out of town," said a National Guard regimental
commander. A leader of the veterans of the Spanish-American War
was quoted as saying that his men would parade past the
headquarters "armed with everything from bolos to head axes."
And "underground channels" were said to have notified
police that a large force of enlisted men would circulate in town
that night, ready to "decisively answer any insult."
When
the sailors appeared in the evening and smashed up Wobbly
headquarters, Mattison was there. After the riot he retired to the
Times office and wrote his story:
Anarchy, the grizzly
hydra-headed serpent which Seattle has been forced to nourish in
its midst by a naturalized chief executive for 18 months, was
plucked from the city and wiped out in a blaze of patriotism last
night. Hundreds of sailors and artillerymen, who carefully planned
the entire maneuver yesterday morning, led the thousands of
cheering civilians to the attack and successfully wrecked the
Industrial Workers of the World headquarters and "direct
action" Socialist headquarters in various parts of the
business district....
Fired with patriotic
enthusiasm and armed only with small American flags, the men in
uniform wrecked the Industrial Workers of the World headquarters
on Washington Street, demolished the news stand of Millard Price
at Fourth Avenue and Pike Street, cleaned out the Industrial
Workers of the World office in the Nestor Building on Westlake
Avenue and the Socialist halls at the Granite Hotel, Fifth and
Virginia, and in an old church at Seventh and Olive Streets.
They
also broke into Socialist headquarters and messed things up a bit,
then wrecked a gospel mission in the Skid Road; when they
discovered their mistake in the latter spot, members of the mob
made one of their number kneel and kiss the flag. The active mob,
estimated at from a thousand by the Sun to twenty thousand by the
Times, was watched by a huge crowd that had gathered for a
Potlatch parade. According to Mattison's story, everyone was
happy; Mattison obviously was--his delight echoed in his prose:
The smashing of
chairs and tables, the rending of yielding timbers, the creaking
and groaning of sundered walls, and above the rest the crash of
glass of the windows on the east side all blended together in one
grand Wagnerian cacophony. And all the while the crowd outside
just howled and cheered. It was almost more joy than they could
stand.
It
was definitely more than Mayor Cotterill could stand. He felt that
the Times had stage--managed the riot, and, while it had passed
almost without bloodshed--one Wobbly got a broken nose--a
resumption of the battle, with the Wobblies ready and the town
packed with holiday visitors, might bring on real anarchy.
Cotterill assumed personal command of the police and fire
departments.
He
ordered the second platoon of firemen, the men ordinarily off
duty, to help police the town. He issued orders that the liquor
stores must remain closed on Saturday and Sunday, and that all
street meetings and public speaking be suspended. He ordered the
chief of police to see to it that no copies of the Seattle Times
were circulated within the city limits until the following Monday,
"unless the proprietors submit to me the entire proofs of any
proposed issue and that it be found and certified by me as
containing nothing calculated to incite to further riot,
destruction of property and danger to human life."
Chief
of Police Bannick stationed a force of twenty-five policemen
around the Times Building, to see that no copies of the Times
leaked out, then went to the colonel's office and handed him a
copy of the proclamation. When Blethen calmed down enough to be
articulate he telephoned his attorney. The lawyer called Judge
Humphries at his home--it was a Saturday morning in August and
Humphries was the only jurist in town--and asked him to hold
court. The judge wrote out bench warrants for Mayor Cotterill and
Chief of Police Bannick, ordering them to appear in court at once.
It
was early afternoon before the warrants were served and the
officials brought before the bar. Judge Humphries, a ponderous man
of profoundly conservative views, asked Cotterill what he meant by
such interference with freedom of the press. The mayor, using
Blethen's own favorite phrase, said that stories as inaccurate as
the one that touched off the Potlatch Riot were not an exercise of
liberty but of license.
The
irony of Blethen's paper being suppressed on the ground that it
was creating anarchy in its advocacy of suppressing anarchy was
lost on Judge Humphries. He was not amused. He issued an order
restraining Cotterill from interfering further with the Times.
(His phrasing indicated that he considered the mayor's action to
be in restraint of business rather than a violation of freedom of
the press.)
But
having told Cotterill to remove the police from around the Times
plant immediately, Humphries proceeded to scold him for almost an
hour for overstepping his authority, a lecture the mayor rather
enjoyed because as long as he was in the courtroom listening the
Times Building was blockaded.
The
police were withdrawn by mid afternoon. The Times hit the streets
with an account of the riot and a story about its troubles with
Cotterill. It referred to the mayor as "an advocate of
anarchy," and the leader of a red-flag gang," and "a
loathsome louse," but in general its tone was mild. No one
was incited to further riot. The last evening of the Potlatch
celebration passed quietly.
On
Sunday the Seattle Sun, a newborn reformist paper, carried a long
statement by the mayor, reviewing his actions. He stood
four-square on civil liberties for everyone, with the possible
exception of Colonel Blethen:
From the time I
became mayor of the City of Seattle, I have directed constantly
that in the making of arrests without warrant no person shall be
thus arrested unless the officer making the arrest has information
of his own knowledge or evidence from some other person upon which
to base a definite charge for the violation of some law or
ordinance.
So far as I have
controlling influence, there has been and shall be no dragging of
people to jail for detention and release without charge, or for
nominal charge unsustained by evidence or expecting dismissal by
the police judge.
On occasion when the
Seattle Times has printed quoted treasonable statements alleged to
have been made by some speaker, I have demanded from the reporter
or city editor that they support by evidence a prosecution in the
particular case which they claim to have heard. Such request has
been refused.
I can not lawfully,
nor will I arbitrarily, attempt to suppress or curtail free speech
anywhere on suspicion or rumor or Seattle Times lies.
In
cases where anarchy was openly advocated, as Cotterill felt it had
been in the Times' story of Daniels' speech and the Skid Road
brawl, he would take action. He defended his move in depriving
Seattleites of alcohol and Blethen editorials for the duration of
the Potlatch as being in the public interest.
"I applied every
power at command," he said, "to preserve the peace and
prevent renewed rioting and threats to life and property. . . . If
I can be blown down by a putrid blast from the Seattle Times, I
have no right or desire to publicly serve."
It
was neither the cool civil-libertarian logic nor the hot rhetoric
that attracted the most attention in Cotterill's statement. What
Seattle buzzed about was his reference to some photographs,
doctored and dirty. There had been rumors of these photographs but
now the story was out in the open.
In
May 1912, according to Cotterill, he had gone to Blethen's office
to talk over his troubles with the Times and to see if some
agreement could be reached. But "Blethen was bitter in his
denunciation of Dr. Mark A. Matthews, Prosecuting Attorney Murphy,
and others connected with the grand jury which had indicted him,"
Cotterill wrote.
With singular
boldness he forced upon my attention two disgraceful photographs
bearing the heads of the two gentlemen upon human figures in
indescribably loathsome relations.
He--Alden
J. Blethen--explained in detail how and why he had conceived the
idea of these vile photographs, secured foundation pictures by
searching out some indecencies from a Paris collection, engaged
one of our best Seattle artists to combine them with perfect
photographic skill with the heads and faces of Dr. Matthews and of
Prosecuting Attorney Murphy. The name of the photographer and the
price he paid for making these faked exhibitions of degeneracy was
part of the Blethen recital."
The
townsfolk looked toward the Times Building for further
developments. Blethen's answer was not long in coming. In a front
page editorial the colonel admitted that he had had the fake
photographs put together. His purpose, he explained, was purely
educational.
When
the grand jury had indicted him for association with the city vice
lords, he had heard a rumor that the prosecution proposed to
introduce
"a piece of
testimony . . . of a most damnable character, an alleged
photograph, faked for the purpose, but representing the editor
with a lewd woman under extraordinary circumstances."
So,
to demonstrate to a jury how easily such documentation could be
faked, Blethen had ordered similar photos involving Murphy and Dr.
Matthews.
"The
sole purpose, as Cotterill knows, was to demonstrate the
viciousness of the Corliss-Burns gang, and to what ends they would
go to convict an innocent man of crime." But since the judge
had directed the jury to bring in a verdict for the defendant
without Blethen's taking the stand, he had not needed to use the
photographs in court. He had shown them to Cotterill merely
because he thought the mayor would be interested.
The
fight reached the halls of Congress. Representative J. W. Bryan of
Bremerton, a Republican who had bolted to the Bull Moose and won
election as delegate-at-large, read into the Congressional Record
a long critique of the colonel's actions, including the complete
text of Cotterill's statement.
Representative
Humphreys of Seattle replied on behalf of Blethen. He said,
"As to the
action of my colleague in attacking various persons in private
life here upon the floor of the House, where he has the protection
of the Constitution thrown about him and can not be called to
account elsewhere for what he may say, one of the highest
privileges that the Government can confer, I do not care to
comment."
Bryan
hurried back to Seattle.
In a
speech before five thousand sympathizers in the Dreamland
Auditorium he repeated the charges without benefit of
congressional immunity from libel. The meeting adopted by
acclamation a resolution censuring the Times "terroristic
tactics" and agreeing to boycott not only the paper but the
advertisers who make its existence possible."
The
boycott failed dismally. The Times continued to prosper. The
affair of the Potlatch Riots dwindled off into a series of
lawsuits--the Times against Cotterill, Bryan against the Times,
Blethen against Bryan--none of which was ever pushed to a
conclusion.
The
real beneficiary of the confusion arising out of the Potlatch
Riots was wiry and wasp-tongued Hiram C. Gill. In the serenity of
the sidelines, the deposed mayor figured out a remarkable
political maneuver by which he turned the riots to his own
advantage.
Gill
had written his own political epitaph after his defeat by
Cotterill. When a reporter had asked him if he would run again, he
said, "Hell, no! I'm one dead'un who knows he's dead."
But when he looked at the list of candidates in the mayoral
primaries in 1914 he felt it was time for his resurrection.
Cotterill,
his eyes on a Senate seat (which he did not achieve) had declined
to run for re-election. Seven clean-city candidates offered
themselves at once. Nobody admitted believing in an open town. On
the last day for filing, Gill appeared at the city hall. He paid
his filing fee with one-dollar bills and told reporters, "Frankly,
I'm getting into this because I know politics well enough to
recognize a soft touch when I see one."
Gill's
re-entry into municipal politics was a surprise to many, but his
campaign was a shock to nearly everyone. He announced that he was
a reform candidate, the only candidate with the ability to run a
closed town effectively. Gill said he was running "to seek
vindication" and to prove to his children that he was a good
man.
His
little boy had come home from school crying one day not long after
the 1912 election; his playmates had said that his father was so
bad he had been kicked out of his job. Now, said Gill, he just
wanted to prove to his son that all he had been doing was the job
as he had promised to do it. The people had elected him in 1910 on
his promise to give them an open town; nobody could deny he kept
that promise.
The
people had changed their minds about an open town and as a result
they "diselected me." Well, he had changed his mind. He
agreed with the voters. He believed in a closed town and, with all
the knowledge he had gained about vice operations in his previous
administration, he could run a better closed town than any
uninformed reformer.
He
sounded convincing. Even the Reverend Dr. Matthews felt it might
be a good idea to give Gill a chance. When the primary votes were
counted, Gill polled two-fifths of the total. He ran two to one
ahead of his nearest rival, a businessman named James D.
Trenholme.
"Why,
that man was unbeatable," Cotterill said later. "He had
all the vice votes. They didn't take his reform seriously and they
had no one close to vote for anyway. But he got a lot of our votes
too," Gill agreed. "I told you I wouldn't have run if it
wasn't a particularly soft spot," he said.
Gill
remained a gentleman through the month of the final campaign. Gone
was the candidate who in 1912 had lashed out at Cotterill as "a
politician who sold the souls of young women to dive-keepers for
votes." In his place was a gentle campaigner who said of his
opponent, "I think James D. Trenholme is personally a fine
man; he is a man of excellent moral character." As an
afterthought he mentioned that Trenholme was backed by the Seattle
Electric Company, which was then in very bad odor.
On
a rainy March day the voters of Seattle elected this new Hiram
Gill mayor by the largest margin by which anyone had ever won the
office. Among those wiring congratulations was John Considine. He
suggested that the mayor-elect appear on a vaudeville show and
deliver a five-minute monologue. He offered five hundred dollars a
week and said Gill could have it until he took office. Gill
declined, saying that Considine had paid Sarah Bernhardt seven
thousand a week and "I being younger than the Divine Sarah
should not consider an offer of less than ten."
When
he took office Gill ran a closed town. He offered the post of
chief of police to one of his political foes, Judge Austin E.
Griffiths. Griffiths didn't want the job but took it when Dr.
Matthews asked him to. Within a few months there were pictures of
Hi Gill smashing kegs of whisky in illegal saloons and breaking up
gaming devices with a sledgehammer. Within a year Colonel Blethen
was demanding Gill's recall on the ground that he was too easy on
Wobbly agitators. "An advocate of anarchy," said the
colonel.
Blethen
died in 1915, and Gill was elected again in 1916. His
third term was his worst. Chief Griffiths had resigned to run for
Congress; his successor resigned as chief after being indicted by
a grand jury. Gill said he hadn't known what was going on. Dr.
Matthews thought this probable and spoke out for him. Talk of
another recall was dropped, but in 1917 Dr. Matthews and Gill and
all Seattle were told what was going on. The Skid Road was wide
open again. Military authorities noted that the venereal- disease
rate at the major Army post of Camp Lewis was skyrocketing and
placed Seattle off-limits to troops.
Again
Gill reformed. He named a strapping seven-footer, Jim Warren, a
former United States marshal, as chief of police, and closed
things down again. But he was dead politically, and this time he
didn't know it. He ran for re-election in 1918 and was
badly beaten in the primaries.
He
had not made the most of the chance he had once asked the voters
to give him-the chance to tell his grandson that he had been mayor
of Seattle, had made a mistake, had been kicked out, but had come
back to be the best mayor Seattle ever had.
In
the finals that year Seattle elected a red-headed reformer named
Ole Hanson.
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