The Centralia massacre occurred at the tail end of the largest immigration wave in American history. Between 1880 and 1924, more than 20 million people came to the United States, mostly from Eastern European and Mediterranean countries. While these immigrants filled the hardest, lowest-paying and most dangerous jobs in America’s industries, native-born whites had little sympathy for them. Instead, native-born whites imagined all sorts of intellectual and physical differences between themselves and these immigrants that, they said, justified their economically marginal positions.
Nativist conspiracy theories also fueled anti-immigrant sentiment. Industrialists like Henry Ford and leading thinkers like Madison Grant imagined that the pope or mysterious Jewish cabals were planning to overrun America with immigrants. Even President Theodore Roosevelt worried that white Americans were committing “race suicide,” effectively allowing themselves to be outbred by more reproductively fecund immigrants.
The IWW challenged these ideas, however. Unlike most labor unions in the early 20th century, which excluded everyone except native-born, white, skilled men, the Wobblies swung their doors wide open to any and all workers, immigrant and native-born alike. The Wobblies said the entire working-class, regardless of race, ethnicity and gender, suffered equally under capitalism and had much to gain by working together to overthrow it.
The union’s anti-capitalist politics and policy of inclusion quickly earned it the ire of business magnates and politicians. Employers in the early 20th century maintained their power by keeping workers divided. As long as white workers fought black workers and immigrant workers fought native-born workers, no one was fighting the boss. Political leaders who were often beholden to America’s industrialists were just as invested in maintaining this system.
The Wobblies threatened to undo this order.
The IWW eventually spread throughout the country, but no matter where it went, conflict and violence often followed. In Utah, the famous Wobbly Joe Hill was arrested, convicted and hanged on a flimsy murder charge in 1915. Five Wobblies were killed in the Everett massacre of 1916. Seventeen IWW members were tarred and feathered in Tulsa in 1917. That same year, more than 1,000 Wobblies were rounded up, put on a train car, then taken to and left in the middle of the desert after they’d tried to organize a union in Bisbee, Ariz.
World War I only intensified native-born Americans’ disdain for the IWW. Many white Americans believed the war had been started by the sort of Eastern European radicals that the IWW was now organizing and that their continued activism threatened to bring that disorder to America’s shores. Yes, Woodrow Wilson said it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy” — but he didn’t believe immigrants should be equal participants in that democratic order. “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him,” Wilson said, “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic when he gets ready.”
In places like Centralia, where the strength of the timber industry gave birth to a strong IWW presence, this heightened combination of nativism and WWI-fueled xenophobia proved deadly. Nov. 11, 1919, was supposed to be a celebration in Centralia. The town’s American Legion had organized a parade of World War I veterans through town. Yet many of Centralia’s World War I veterans were not in a celebratory mood. As they saw it, the Wobbly’s continued presence in town was an affront to their efforts in the war against outside forces of radicalism.