Murray C. Morgan
George Cotterill, Hiram Gill and the Potlatch Riots

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.