The Everett Massacre was a confrontation between members of the Industrial Workers of the World and local authorities in Everett, Washington. In Ben Compton’s account, it grows from a labor dispute over the right to speak in public into an organized attempt to prevent the visiting workers from holding a meeting.

Background and Arrival

After working in a fruit cannery on the Columbia River, Ben Compton and Bram Hicks read about a shingle workers’ strike and a free-speech fight in Everett. They decided to go there to support the workers. In Seattle, they found the Industrial Workers of the World headquarters crowded with young men arriving from across the United States and Canada. The organization provided a network through which the group could travel together, but their presence in Everett was met by armed deputies rather than an open meeting place.

The party went by boat to Everett intending to hold a meeting near the corner of Wetmore and Hewitt Avenues. Deputies carrying rifles and revolvers filled the dock. As the workers came ashore, officers arrested them and gathered them at the end of the dock. The planned public meeting had thus become a confrontation over whether the visiting organizers would be permitted to enter the city and speak.

The Dock and the Gauntlet

The arrests began as the visitors stepped from the boat. Deputies gathered the Industrial Workers of the World members at the end of the dock, then forced them onto a truck. As the group was taken away, a deputy fell while trying to strike one of the men; the workers’ brief laughter sharpened the authorities’ hostility. The party was brought to a wooded road crossing, where armed deputies and the sheriff discussed what would happen next. The men were warned against returning to Everett, though they had come, they said, to exercise their right to speak.

The deputies formed two lines and made the workers pass between them. Ben Compton was singled out for questioning about his union membership and beaten after affirming it. Amid the assault, he lost his glasses, fell near the railroad tracks, and struggled onward while other members of the group helped him across the crossing. Bram Hicks called out that they had reached the county line. Behind them, shots and shouts marked the continued violence against those still making their way through the gauntlet.

Injury, Recovery, and the Defense Campaign

At the interurban trolley station, the battered group collected money to buy tickets to Seattle for those most seriously hurt; Ben Compton was so dazed that he could barely hold the ticket someone put in his hand. Bram Hicks and the others set out to walk the thirty miles back. Compton spent three weeks in hospital. The injuries to his back affected his kidneys and left him in severe pain, while morphine made him barely aware of the wounded men brought in after the shooting on the Everett dock on November 5. When he was discharged, he could only just walk. His acquaintances were in jail, and a letter waiting for him at General Delivery enclosed fifty dollars from Gladys and said that his father wanted him to come home.

The Defense Committee urged Compton to remain in the movement and raise funds in the East for the defense of seventy-four Industrial Workers of the World members held in the Everett jail on murder charges. He spent a couple of weeks in Seattle doing odd jobs for the committee and trying to find a way home. A supporter in a shipping office eventually secured him a berth as supercargo on a freighter bound for New York through the Panama Canal. The voyage and its detailed clerical work helped him regain some strength, but the violence continued to return in nightmares: he repeatedly dreamed that deputies were forcing him through the gauntlet. The dreams made it difficult for him to lie down to sleep, and his shipmates, mistaking his distress for drug use, kept their distance. Reaching New York, whose tall buildings appeared in the morning haze, marked the end of the journey, not the immediate end of the event’s effects on him.

Political and Narrative Significance

The confrontation turns a demand to hold a public meeting into a test of who can exercise free speech and who controls access to the town. The workers state that they have come to claim constitutional rights; the deputies answer with arrest, threats, and a forced passage between two lines of men. The county boundary becomes a narrow point of escape, but it does not end the consequences: seventy-four members of the Industrial Workers of the World remain jailed on murder charges, and the Defense Committee must organize their defense. By following Ben Compton from the dock through the hospital and into the fundraising campaign, the narrative makes state repression legible not only as a public clash but as lasting injury, fear, and organized work on behalf of those still detained.