Solidarity (newspaper)

Solidarity is a newspaper whose clearest role in the novel is to carry news of labor conflict to workers far from the struggle. When Ben Compton and Bram Hicks read its account of a shingleweavers’ strike and a free-speech fight in Everett, Washington, they decide to go there and help; the paper turns distant events into a call for solidarity in person.

Identity and Evidence

The novel identifies Solidarity through the act of reading: Ben and Bram encounter reports in its pages while working at a fruit cannery on the Columbia River. The evidence establishes its subject matter—labor organizing and the fight for free speech—but gives no editor, publication location, circulation figures, or description of the paper’s production. Its significance here rests on what the men learn from it and what they do next.

Reports That Prompt a Journey

The newspaper reaches the two men after a sequence of precarious jobs. Following the wheat harvest in Saskatchewan, they take work in a cannery where the job is steamy and foul-smelling. As they read about the shingleweavers’ strike and Everett’s free-speech struggle, they decide to go down and help. The report gives them a destination and a cause: a conflict encountered in print becomes a reason to leave their current work and join a wider labor fight.

From Reading to Direct Action

The decision leads them first to Vancouver and then by boat to Seattle, where the Industrial Workers of the World headquarters is crowded with young men arriving from across the United States and Canada. From there, a large group travels by boat to Everett to try to hold a meeting. Deputies armed with rifles and revolvers arrest the workers as they step off the boat; Ben is struck with a rifle butt, and the men are forced onto trucks. The account does not describe the newspaper’s later role in the confrontation, but it establishes a sharp progression: Solidarity reports the conflict, and its readers enter the dangerous scene the report has brought to their attention.

Place in the Novel

Solidarity’s narrative function is specific rather than expansive. It is not shown as an abstract emblem of labor politics or as the organizer of the Everett action; the text shows two workers reading its reports and deciding to act. That limited but consequential link places the newspaper between distant struggle and face-to-face participation, connecting the circulation of information to the movement of workers themselves.