Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919, is a new book by Cal Winslow ’66 which tells the story of why the General Strike happened in Seattle and nowhere else, and how Seattle’s workers ran the city for a week in February 1919.

“Winslow describes how Seattle’s General Strike was actually the high point in a long process of early twentieth-century socialist and working-class organization, when everyday people built a viable political infrastructure that seemed, to governments and corporate bosses, radical—even “Bolshevik.” Drawing from original research, Winslow depicts a process that, in struggle, fused the celebrated itinerants of the West with the workers of a modern industrial city. But this book is not only an account of the heady days of February 1919; it is also about the making of a class capable of launching one of America’s most gripping strikes—what E. P. Thompson once referred to as “the long tenacious revolutionary tradition of the common people” (Monthly Review).

Author, labor activist, and educator Cal Winslow is Director of The Mendocino Institute and a retired fellow in environmental history at UC Berkeley. Among his books are Labor’s Civil War in California and Rebel Rank and File, co-author of Albion’s Fatal Tree, and editor of E.P Thompson and the Making of the New Left.