Remembering Walker Smith

The following biography was written in 2002 for use on this website 
by one of Walker Smith’s daughters, Shirley Smith Suttles.

At the time of the Everett tragedy, Walker C. Smith was laid up with a broken leg. But he went downtown on crutches to help organize the defense of the workers who were jailed on their return to Seattle from Everett. His most immediate task was to see to it that the weekly Socialist World provided speedy coverage. The massacre was on a November Sunday, the fifth; the paper (described by Harvey O’Connor in his book Revolution in Seattle as “a Walker Smith masterpiece”) hit the streets on Tuesday. Then he began writing a number of articles and accounts which appeared in, for example, the International Socialist Review in December and in January, and in Mother Earth in February, each ending in a plea for funds for the Everett Prisoners’ Defense Committee. Within the year—and apparently without relinquishing or slackening up on his editorial duties or other writing--he wrote, and the I.W.W. Publishing Bureau (Chicago) published, the book-length “official” Wobbly account, The Everett Massacre, A History of the Class Struggle in the Lumber Industry.

 Walker Conger Smith was born in Washington, D.C. on August 16, 1885. He was one of nine children born to Charles Payne Smith and Eleanor DeForest Potter. Of the nine, one daughter and six sons survived to adulthood. Walker attended both grade school and high school in the District of Columbia. In 1901 the family moved west to Colorado. There Walker and his younger brother Kenneth began to explore their interest in socialism and in the working lives of the coal miners of Colorado and the miners and smeltermen in Cripple Creek, Walker becoming a member of the Western Federation of Miners.

In 1909, now a young husband, he moved to Denver, where he and his wife Marie Beidel were among the charter members of IWW Local 26 and where, in October of that year, their first daughter, Enid Eleanor, was born. In 1910 they left for Spokane. There he became editor of the Industrial Worker and there their second daughter, Lois Carol, was born in May of 1912. 

The family’s last move was to Seattle at the end of 1913. It was in Seattle that Walker began working in the dry-cleaning industry, a trade he had first been associated with in Colorado (his brother DeForest owned and operated a dry-cleaning shop in Denver), and once again he became active in the radical movement, first as editor of the Socialist World and later as editor of other publications. His association with the dry-cleaning industry and his devotion to the radical cause, in particular to the I.W.W., were to last the rest of his life, as did his passion for writing. 

Walker wrote a constant stream of essays, articles, and editorials. He wrote plays and skits; he wrote verse both serious and comic. He also tirelessly wrote letters to the editors of newspapers and journals, and he wrote, in addition to The Everett Massacre, two notable pamphlets, Sabotage, Its History, Philosophy and Function (1913) and Was It Murder? The Truth About Centralia (1922), the latter being an account of “the Causes Leading to, the Actual Events of, and the Trial That Followed the Armistice Day Tragedy at Centralia, Wash., Nov. 11, ’19.” Was It Murder? was distributed free, in hopes of a wide readership and of reaping contributions to the Defense Publicity Committee which was working for a fair trial for the seven imprisoned men. 

Like many others during the first World War, Walker Smith was charged with “criminal syndicalism,” but the charges against him and others were dismissed. At one of the trials a deputy prosecutor had to read the pamphlet Sabotage from cover to cover before it could be admitted as evidence. The judge concluded that nothing in the book advocated the overthrow of the present system by force and violence.
Marie and Walker’s third daughter, Shirley Janet, was born in Seattle in March of 1922. Less than five years later, on February 17, 1927, Walker died from a long-standing and gradually worsening heart condition. He was 41 years old. Enid, the oldest daughter, was 17, Lois almost
15, and Shirley one month from her fifth birthday. According to the obituary in the trade journal Allied Cleaner & Dyer, his funeral services were attended by several hundred friends and a full representation of all the plants and press shops in Seattle, including many allied tradesmen. When he first began working on the Allied Cleaner & Dyer, its coverage of the industry was limited to Seattle. At his death, it included Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.

In his book Americanism Versus Bolshevism, Ole Hanson, a former Mayor of Seattle, speaks of “Walker C. Smith, who has enjoyed the hospitality of our Seattle jail several times,” and says “Creatures like Walker C. Smith publish such doctrines, teach them upon every occasion, brag of their defiance of law and order, and the United States Government apparently can find no law to send them where they belong, to the Federal Penitentiaries.”

Walker was a skilled writer of a popular verse-form of his time. One example might serve as his reply:

AVERSE TO OLE
By Walker C. Smith

I must confess I cannot guess just why our mighty mayor thinks green is red and from his head tears out a chunk of hair, and yells for gore, and slams the door, or cuts some comic caper, whene’er he views a man of news from Labor’s Daily Paper. 

I search my mind but cannot find what makes him so chaotic, so loose of tongue, so strong of lung, so nuttily neurotic; unless perchance, St. Vitus Dance has made our Ole looney, until his brain can’t stand the strain of hearing of Tom Mooney. 

“The court-house news you cannot use in my administration! I’ll hang each red until he’s dead to lamp-posts through the nation! All that I need is to be freed from any office worry; give me a clerk to do my work—I’ll clean house in a hurry!

“I’ll first commence, from ‘evidence,’ to mix me a gin rickey, and as I quaff the Bacchic glass I’ll down the Bolsheviki! The government ain’t worth a cent; I’ll make it pure and holy! I stand for LAW! I eat ‘em raw! Just keep your eye on Ole!”

Marie remained active in the labor movement and worked as a marker and checker in the dry-cleaning department of the Model-Washington Laundry until shortly before her death on July 18, 1948. 
----Shirley Janet (Smith) Suttles