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REVIEWS
CLASS AND GENDER POLITICS IN PROGRESSIVE-ERA SEATTLE
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by John C. Putman
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| University of Nevada Press, Reno and Las Vegas, 2008. Notes, bibliography, index. 312 pages. $39.95 cloth. |
| John Putman has written a fine treatment of the politics of early twentieth-century Seattle. He makes some important contributions to our understanding of Washington's metropolis, and at the same time helps us think more productively about Progressivism generally. Putman, above all, seeks to explain the distinctiveness, power, and fate of Progressivism in Seattle. He makes a persuasive argument that class and gender were central to explaining why the city's reform impulse waxed and waned. Scholars have long seen Seattle — at least before it became the homeland of Microsoft and Starbucks — as the West Coast's premier working-class city, with a powerful union presence and a whole host of colorful labor radicals. Yet, Putman smartly extends this basic insight by arguing that we cannot explain municipal politics by simply declaring the city proletarian. Instead, labor's power in many ways depended on cross-class alliances with members of the middle class — particularly female political activists. |
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This is an innovative and intriguing argument. First, Putman usefully recognizes that we cannot just equate "working class" with radicalism and "middle class" with conservatism. Politics within both classes was varied, changing, and always dependent on the pull of particular events. Many labor leaders and female workers, for example, supported the "middle-class" issue of prohibition, even if male workers were overwhelmingly opposed to the banning of alcohol. Second, insofar as the citizens in the working class and middle class came together politically, the primary bridge builders were women. In the late nineteenth century, for instance, unionists, on their own, were not able to garner political support for their organization drives or for worker-friendly legislation. Yet, when they allied with woman suffragists, who had also not been able to successfully push their agenda, working-class power significantly increased. In turn, union support for women's right to vote helped push that issue across the electoral finish line, making Seattle the largest city in the nation, at the time, to gain woman suffrage. |
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From 1910 through roughly the entry of the United States into World War I in 1917, this cross-class coalition held significant power in Seattle. Workers benefitted from a friendly municipal government, women's voices became more and more prominent in the public sphere, and reformers from both classes and sexes supported a crusade against vice. Still, this coalition was ever-fragile. When the economy slumped and workers became more radical, elites counterattacked with an anti-union and anti-red crusade of their own that effectively split the working class and the middle class. |
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While Putman is clearly on the side of the unionists and feminists here, he skillfully narrates the decline, as well as the rise, of his Progressives. This is not a study of heroic hopes dashed, but rather one of somber hope that we might again see the revival of a labor-feminist alliance. (The current-day political meanings of the book, however, are unfortunately rather muted.) |
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Naturally, Putman could have improved his book in several ways. His declaration that this is a book about "the West" runs into the common problem that there is really no one historical "West" that scholars can usefully generalize about. Putman shows that Seattleites did occasionally invoke their status as westerners, but even that did not seem to have happened all that much. And such bold regionalist statements from the introduction as "there is no better time, then, to search for the origins of regional identity in the Pacific Northwest than the dawn of the twentieth century" receive almost no support in the heart of the text (p. 4). |
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In terms of the writing, much of the book tends toward somewhat dry narration of political conflicts rather than attempting to draw riveting personal portraits or continually advancing interpretive arguments. And the book could have used a much more robust conclusion, placing Putman's findings about Seattle in conversation with other scholarly work about the workings of Progressivism. That said, Putman's book is a valuable contribution that will definitely interest not only scholars but also many lay-readers of Pacific Northwest history. |
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| Robert D. Johnston
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| University at Illinois at Chicago |
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