December 28, 1879: Jimmy Duncan

The Seattle General Strike of February 1919 meant many different things to the many different people involved. For local radicals, it was a crucial opportunity for political revolution. For Ole Hanson, Seattle's ambitious ultra-right-wing mayor, it was an early manifestation of the Red Menace in America, a dragon of anarchy begging to be slain.

For James A. "Jimmy" Duncan, the progressive union organizer born on the date in focus here, the strike was an opportunity both for the advancement of his own local political career and for Seattle labor--under his leadership during the strike--to establish its independence from the control of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), then the dominant national labor union.

Duncan, secretary of the Seattle Central Labor Council during the strike, had already played a major role in strengthening the council's power in Seattle politics, such that many locals referred to his reformist approach, which advocated uniting all the local trade unions under one big tent, as "Duncanism." The council under Duncan's influence was far enough to the left to bring local labor's radicals into the fold, yet sufficiently moderate not to alienate the conservatives.

In the wake of the unfortunate failure of the strike, three men gained power from the resulting disunity among Seattle's labor movement. These included Hansen, who became a national hero in the post-WWI red scare; Samuel Gompers, the national AFL leader who personally intervened in Seattle to reassert the AFL's power here; and Dave Beck, a local Teamster leader who had rejected the strike and would eventually become the Teamsters' executive vice-president and a dominant figure in Seattle politics.

Jimmy Duncan was not among these beneficiaries of the strike's failure. In 1920, he ran for mayor of Seattle on a platform partly in defense of the strike. He was defeated by a Republican lawyer, Hugh M. Caldwell, 50,875 votes to 33,777. Despite that defeat, he remained a respected, if not powerful, figure in Seattle labor for many years afterward.

Sources: Murray Morgan, "Skid Road" (Viking Press, 1951); Rogert Sale, "Seattle, Past to Present" (University of Washington Press, 1976); Pacific Northwest Quarterly archives.