18th Inning LIFE AND BREATH IN THE FOREVER CITY

When the Seattle Mariners played the Houston Astros in Game Three of the American League Division Series (ALDS) on October 15, 2022, the game took place during the autumn of humankind. Sunny commentary from TBS broadcasters reassured television audiences that it was a “picture perfect day in Seattle,” but that picture was polluted by yellow wildfire smoke drifting in from Bolt Creek. The “Air Quality Index”—an Orwellian stat that West Coast residents had only gotten used to checking in recent years—measured 161 when the game started.¹ That was categorically “unhealthy” for the general public, but the mass health hazard didn’t dissuade Mariners team officials from opening T-Mobile Park’s retractable roof, further exposing a capacity crowd of forty-eight thousand to toxic haze. Of planetary decay brought on by torrents of carbon from cars, US military activity, and corporate polluters, Mariners fans had a pristine view.

The Coast Salish peoples who stewarded these lands for millennia before white settlement knew well enough to strategically ignite select patches of area greenwood, because small tactical blazes prevented natural brush fires from doing too much damage. Under the industrial management of major timber corporations, area forests were more prone to unproductive wildfires than public woodlands.² The civilization that whites grifted upon Native land was made to burn. Seattleites lunged for the gasoline.

While making headlines as the head of a “green” city, Mayor Jenny Durkan never followed through on her 2017 campaign promise to build a comprehensive bike network in the city as an alternative to automobile travel; her office even canceled bike lanes already in construction.³ When the aging West Seattle Bridge closed for repairs in 2020, area elected officials lobbied for federal funds to reopen it but didn’t add any rail, biking, wheelchair, or pedestrian pathways on its new surface.⁴ Many organized homeowners went on as they had for decades, fighting urban density that would reduce carbon emissions by reducing the length of commutes city dwellers made in cars. Data from the 2020 census revealed Seattle’s pro- environmentalist reputation to be largely fraudulent: the city sprawled more than Los Angeles and Miami.⁵ And though the Amazon corporation had bought and repurposed KeyArena—renaming it and its Coast Salish rainhat–inspired roof Climate Pledge Arena—the company was among the largest polluters on the planet. With TBS announcers not mentioning the source of the filthy mist that clouded the on-field action between the Astros and Mariners in October 2022, many viewers were unaware that something was seriously wrong in Seattle.

In the twenty-first century the struggle to reverse the worst impacts of climate change has been daunting and steep. Odds have mounted, morale has been low, and defeat seems much more likely than victory. Few understand the moral fiber required to sustain a fight like that better than Seattle Mariners fans. Since the 9/11 fall of 2001, the M’s missed the playoffs every year, making them the only team in the four major American sports leagues to do so for that long—twenty-one years. Seattle didn’t appear on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast for twelve years between 2004 and 2016, a testament to their terribleness.⁶ On June 19 the Mariners’ 2022 campaign seemed doomed. Seattle sat near the cellar of the American League West standings at 29–39. In a stunning turnaround, they went 25–6 between June 21 and July 27, won fourteen games in a row during that stretch, and concluded the season 61–33 to make the playoffs. A world beleaguered by rising seas needed resilient mariners, and Seattle had theirs.

From my eighth-floor University District apartment—the brick fortress Malloy, constructed during Seattle’s 1920s building boom—I could hear it all: cheers emanating from the dingy sports bar across the street after the thirteen walk-off hits the Mariners slapped in 2022; cars honking when Seattle eliminated Toronto in the American League Wild Card round; the alarming cough of the resident in the next unit as wildfire smoke intensified; work calls on Zoom derailed by score updates and discussions about the team. Was there a surer sign that the end times had arrived than Seattleites honestly believing the Mariners could win the World Series?

As it had during the miracle season of 1995, baseball fever swept Seattle. The new contagion was more welcome than the other one that still hadn’t subsided. In March 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic unplugged civic connection in most American cities, cloistering Seattleites into quarantine with the rest of the country. When public gatherings resumed, they were smothered in a thick layer of social anxiety, the inevitable result of many people feeling for two years that their bodies were the vessels of societal collapse. The influenza pandemic of 1918 caused the first recorded instances of the “Seattle Freeze” of standoffish Seattleites; the COVID-19 pandemic left many city dwellers craving collective dopamine.⁷

Smaller foreshocks anticipated the larger quake of support for the Mariners. On Saturday, April 16, 2022, the NHL Kraken, the Sounders, and the Mariners all played home games, turning Seattle’s recently expanded subway into a public feeder system for privately owned sports leagues. Seattle fans rooted for Sue Bird during her final WNBA season as the Storm made a deep playoff push in summer 2022. In September, Seahawks fans rained boos on Denver Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson—the most accomplished player in Seattle football history—when he returned to Seattle after being traded earlier in the year. Though some Seattle spectators had a vicious streak, as when they hurled racial slurs at Warren Moon in the 1970s, they could be magnanimous as well. At WNBA playoff games in September 2022, fans graciously cheered the visiting Las Vegas Aces during player introductions.⁸ But baseball had been the sport most closely tied to the city’s boiling ambition ever since the 1870s, when Seattleites traveled with their team to games against competitors for the railroad. Mariners fandom unlocked Seattle chauvinism.

After the Mariners beat Toronto to advance to play the Houston Astros, some Seattle fans were full of themselves. In Game Two of the first-to-two series in Canada, the M’s erased a seven-run deficit to win 10–9; Seattle fans taunted their Toronto counterparts on social media and in the press, puncturing whatever positive underdog aura they may have had going into their ALDS showdown with the Astros. An iota of success had revealed many Seattle baseball fans to be as cutthroat as everybody else, their decades of futility failing to impart them with the pleasant countenance expected of perennial losers. After twenty years of playoff starvation, Mariners fans felt entitled to their pound of flesh. They sought it in Houston, a city it had maintained sometimes subtle, sometimes explicit sports and civics rivalries with since the 1980s.

Back in 2017, the Houston Astros had won the World Series with the help of systematic cheating; in the cutthroat world of professional sports, the team was doing business as business was done. Baseball tends to invoke tear-jerker sentimentality from its followers—seen clearly, it’s a crassly materialistic sport, prone to periodic moral panics about steroids and rule-bending, and always beholden to big money. In the twenty-one seasons comprising 2002 through 2022, when the Mariners finally made the playoffs after last appearing in 2001, eighty-four teams played in baseball’s League Championship rounds: sixty-three of them had payrolls above the league average. Of the twenty-one champs crowned in this period, seventeen had above-average spending on player salaries, and ten were in the top ten. In 2022 the mighty Houston Astros had the league’s ninth largest payroll ($194.1 million). By contrast, the Mariners’ comparatively meager spending on player salaries ($128.7 million) ranked twenty-first of thirty teams.⁹ The end of most underdog stories are written with the same pens that sign checks; Seattle had little chance against one of the best teams money could buy.

Established (unknown at the time) on top of one of the largest petroleum reservoirs on the planet, Houston was the luckiest city in the United States; in the 2022 ALDS against the Mariners, it showed. In Game One of the first-to-three series played in Houston, Seattle raced out to a 4–0 start, then took a 7–3 lead into the bottom of the eighth. The Astros scored two runs in their half of the inning; when Mariners manager Scott Servais inexplicably allowed struggling pitcher Robbie Ray to face one of the most potent hitters in the game, slugger Yordan Alvarez blasted a three-run walk-off homer in the ninth. Game Two followed a familiar script, with Seattle taking a 2–1 lead that was erased in the sixth by a two-run dinger from Alvarez. Down 0–2 and heading back to Seattle after dropping two games they should have won, the Mariners counted on their home-field advantage in T-Mobile Park to stave off elimination.

For the October 14 game in Seattle, Mariners fans packed Pioneer Square an hour before airtime. Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready played the national anthem, and Mariners legend Félix Hernández threw out the opening pitch. All of it was blanketed by thick wildfire smoke that lingered all day and all night. What followed for the next six hours and twenty-two minutes was the most excruciating baseball game in the sport’s modern history: a scoreless marathon broken open on a one-run shot by Astros shortstop Jeremy Peña in the top of the eighteenth. When the Mariners failed to answer in their half of the inning, their fate was sealed. Houston advanced to the American League Championship Series, on the way to winning the World Series.

In recent years record numbers of Major League Baseball games have been canceled due to inclement weather—yet another example of the human-made impact of climate change. That Game Three between the Mariners and Astros was even played forecasted a dreary future. The spectacle of a predominantly Latin American labor force going to work under these conditions was a clear articulation of the late capitalist social contract: come pandemic or deadly pollution, city dwellers who could afford the price of admission expected their strawberries to be picked, their food delivered, their raspberry macchiatos with a shot of espresso served, their game-winning homers hit.

A display of human endurance during climate collapse, the Mariners’ 2022 playoff run was in any case well-timed. Had Seattle waited another two decades to make the playoffs, there may not have been much of a planet left to play on.

Urban America is the country’s respiratory system, inhaling people, labor, and raw materials, then exhaling commodities, symbols, and ideas. When urban areas become congested, nothing moves; when they sneeze, the country falls ill. In February 2020 a Seattle-area resident died of a mysterious respiratory malady that was making its way through the country. This person is believed to be the first US casualty of the illness, until subsequent autopsies revealed an earlier death in Kansas on January 9, 2020—the same day that the World Health Organization announced a spate of pneumonia-like cases in the Wuhan region of China.¹⁰ Though some people began to scrub their groceries and mail, believing the infection bred on surfaces, a more accurate profile of the virus gradually emerged: it spreads primarily through respiratory droplets that linger in the air. Tight spaces like office cubicles, elevators, and enclosed sports stadiums facilitate its proliferation among human hosts.¹¹ Per capita fatalities of the virus were greater in more sparsely populated areas of the country; caseloads accumulated more rapidly in big cities. Epidemiologists understood the disease to be the result of a novel instantiation of coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2, and believed the first outbreak occurred in December 2019.¹² As a result, it was named COVID-19.

Because they bring people together, sports were the canary in the coal mine for the social disruption caused by COVID-19. On March 11, 2020, a game between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the visiting Utah Jazz was abruptly canceled, with news breaking just before the game that Utah center Rudy Gobert had tested positive for COVID-19. As a packed house at Chesapeake Arena waited anxiously for the game to start, the stadium public address announcer took to the mic: “Due to unforeseen circumstances the game has been postponed. We are all safe.”¹³

But we weren’t all safe. The intensive care units of hospitals in major cities soon became packed with patients in need of intubation. As COVID-19 attacked the human vascular system, those who contracted even mild cases reported lingering health effects: trouble concentrating, shortness of breath, inability to achieve an erection. Nor was the game between Oklahoma City and Utah “postponed.” It would never be played. In spring 2020 shelter-in-place orders flowed from state and local governments trying to stop the pandemic’s spread; the 2019–20 NBA season was delayed, and seasons of other major sports leagues followed. Just as the premature end of the 1919 Stanley Cup Championship in Seattle was a flash point in the influenza pandemic a century earlier, the game played by the relocated Seattle basketball team in Oklahoma City announced a new global contagion.

Even the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, couldn’t stop pro-sports ticket sales and advertising revenue. Whatever halted America’s sports calendar had to be a serious threat to the way of life that our games were often at the center of. And for many, that’s exactly what COVID-19 was. It emptied sports bars and cafés, cleared spaces of civic gathering, quieted once-clamoring cosmopolitan cities. But in the same way that Plato once wrote that “every city is divided into a city of the poor and a city of the rich,” there were two pandemics: one for the 63.4 million “white-collar” professional, technical, and managerial workers who comprised 43 percent of the US labor force in 2020; and another pandemic for the country’s 1.3 million food delivery workers, its 1.7 million rideshare drivers, its 2.7 million grocery store employees, its 24.3 million laborers in education and health services.¹⁴ Though both of these labor contingents were concentrated largely in urban America, only one had the luxury of commuting to work via teleconferencing software. Despite company miscreants who deliberately misclassified many laborers as managers in order to deny them union benefits, a more or less stark divide existed in the American workforce, separating capitalists, supervisors who sided with them, and workers who generated all the value.

Make no mistake: with the exception of global elites whose wealth increased greatly because of a rise in media streaming and in-home purchases during quarantine, COVID-19 hurt everybody.¹⁵ But the anxieties and aspirations of America’s more privileged labor cohort swiftly became shorthand for the country’s general pandemic experience. The trope of quarantine bread-baking and Zoom mishaps defined the times, as if millions of others hadn’t gone on tending to the sick, shuttling around passengers, ringing up groceries, and delivering food while others worked from home. In May 2020, for example, 73 percent of workers in managerial occupations teleconferenced, compared to 7 percent of service workers.¹⁶ Behind only Austin, Seattle saw the second largest increase in the utilization of food-delivery apps in 2020–21, with hurried cyclists for DoorDash and Postmates bobbing in and out of city bike lanes.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing class tensions in American cities. During quarantine, telecommuting customers whose only in-person social interaction in a given day was with the local barista came to expect the requisite pleasantries and prompt service. They were disappointed to find harried coffee slingers who weren’t in the mood. In a plot twist, service workers often managed those who wanted to speak to the manager, asking angry customers to wear masks and social distance. In the early 2020s the perfect storm of pandemic, short-tempered customers and low pay created a crisis in the labor market—described by economists as “the great resignation”—and sparked a wave of worker organization in fields long thought to be immune to unionization: newspapers, nonprofits, and political campaigns, among others.¹⁷ Starbucks’s earlier union-busting history was reanimated when Howard Schultz returned as the company’s CEO to fight the wave of workers organizing at his company’s stores in 2021. Millennial and Gen-Z baristas in Seattle who had mostly known Schultz as the bastard billionaire who let the Sonics escape to Oklahoma City had a new reason to revile him. At a Starbucks picket line in Seattle’s University District in August 2022, a worker wearing mini-guillotines as earrings carried a sign that read “FIRST THE SUPERSONICS, NOW THIS?”¹⁸

The NBA has long been a window into US labor relations in ways that football and baseball are not—a sport where labor switches teams more freely than in more traditional leagues, and individual performances impact games with an immediacy not seen elsewhere. With no hats or helmets to hide behind, sweaty basketball players go to work in jerseys and shorts that don’t extend past the knees. Like pedestrians sauntering past a construction site, fans can see how hard the richest unionized workers in the world are working, and on what. Off the court, NBA players often make front-office decisions, recruit their friends to come play with them, and are generally empowered to an extent not seen in America’s other sports leagues.

In their 2018 book Managerial Capitalism, economists Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy wrote that “the rise of the managerial classes conveys new systems of thought—ways of life, morals, social behaviors.”¹⁹ Professional basketball is an epiphenomenon of late-stage capitalism—a period where freelancers, temps, Instagram influencers, Etsy sellers, YouTube fitness gurus, Twitter “grind bros,” and SoundCloud rappers operate as businesses unto themselves, making the marketing and bureaucratic responsibilities once handled by major corporations the entire basis of their online personas. To be sure, “hustlers” had existed in American cities for decades: teenage Sick’s Stadium concession stand worker William Nass referred to himself as one while describing his time peddling peanuts and popcorn to Seattle crowds in the 1940s.²⁰ But with the decline of traditional nine-to-five jobs, the onset of corporate outsourcing, and the breakdown of traditional kindship networks during deindustrialization, hustlers moved from the margins of American society to somewhere nearer the center. The NBA bolsters the neoliberal fantasy that through superhuman individual effort and deep-seated distrust of one’s peers, great wealth and status can be attained. Consequently, the most popular players tend to be scoring guards who play not just one-on-five but one-on-nine—that is, ballers who overcome both the structural failings of their own teams and also opposing defenses to step back and fade away from everyone else.

In a country where self-monetization is culture—a 1099 tax form a personality—central concerns for NBA fans include scheduling, workload management, and contracts. The price and movement of labor is followed by NBA media as closely as actual games. Glorified human resource conflicts between team management and employees make headlines. Fans have become familiar with rotational diagnostics like the “plus-minus,” which allow pundits to measure an individual player’s productivity relative to their peers. Through 2023, a top-line sponsor of basketball writer Bill Simmons’s podcast—the most downloaded sports podcast of all time—was Indeed.com, a hiring website. Professional basketball is a pastime for millions who spend their work lives on admin tasks, supervisor check-ins, performance evaluations, and hiring panels. The spectacle of professional basketball is postindustrial capitalism gazing at itself.

In basketball games played in the pandemic-proof bubble the NBA established in Orlando, fans teleconferenced “into” the games, their faces displayed on courtside digital screens in a clumsy tech promotion sponsored by Microsoft.²¹ In the 2020–21 season Milwaukee Bucks center Giannis Antetokounmpo’s life story became the stuff of a Disney movie, a meritocratic fairy tale about a starving Nigerian-Greco youth who fashioned himself into a champion, persevering through pain and fatigue in a season defined by debilitating injuries to players.²² During a pandemic that many didn’t survive, Antetokounmpo symbolized survival of the fittest. Sports media praised him for seemingly never resting, for not exercising the power of free agency to play for another team—in short, for being a model employee.

If pandemic basketball typified US labor relations, it also reproduced the disparities therein. The sibling league to the NBA, the WNBA also played the remainder of their interrupted 2020 season in a COVID-safe campus in Orlando in 2020; its players made significantly less money than their male counterparts for enduring the same inconvenience. Because many WNBA players were single mothers and primary caregivers, the league was forced to allow children who had no other caretakers into the closed-off Orlando campus.²³ As women workers in all fields are more likely to put in “second shifts” of housework—with male partners unwilling or unlikely to help pick up the slack, even and especially as these responsibilities increased during quarantine—the WNBA mirrored a core inequity of capitalism.

After the Sue Bird–led Seattle Storm won yet another WNBA Championship in 2020—their fourth in sixteen years—a graphic circulated by Fadeaway World revealed a tremendous wage gap: Bird had won as many championships as LeBron James in the same amount of seasons but made 187 times less in salary that year ($215,000 to James’s $37.4 million). Bird’s win bonus for being on the team that won the 2020 WNBA title was $11,356. For James’s equivalent accomplishment in the NBA, the figure was $370,000.²⁴ Both Bird and James lived lives of conspicuous privilege, earning more in social acclaim and riches than most wage laborers could ever dream of. That deep inequity followed them even into utopia, which didn’t bode well for those left behind.

Just as ideas vary on how progressive movements start, not all sports observers believe in momentum. Some statisticians hold that events are just events and don’t necessarily add up to a winning wave. Common sense suggests otherwise. A ball rolls out of bounds during a basketball game, resulting in a turnover; the other team scores. The crowd cheers, igniting confidence where previously there was none. A missed shot leads to another basket. A sense of inevitability builds. Politically, matters unfold in much the same way: a precipitating event ignites public awareness. Conversations start. Protests push an agenda that only used to be whispered in private. At this point affairs can go in one of two ways: continued wins that ripple outward in changed economic conditions, changed laws, and changed behavior; alternatively, a conservative response can stifle what once seemed promising.

During the civil rights summer of 2020, the feeling in Seattle was that a window of opportunity had opened to curtail police abuses. For a century starting with its inception in 1869, as detailed in Christopher T. Bayley’s book Seattle Justice, the Seattle Police Department was patently corrupt, operating as a protection racket until reformers waged a systematic effort to weed out police corruption in the 1970s. During the Progressive Era, Seattle cops sold licenses to establishments that sold sex work and alcohol, and badgered businesses that didn’t pay bribes. In the post–World War II period, when establishments with pinball machines became a high-stakes front for criminal enterprise in Seattle, police continued selectively enforcing the law, shielding mafiosos who handed over the requisite bribes.²⁵ As early as 1926, the Seattle Police Department brought shame on the city, with the New York Times referring to it as “a citadel of entrenched evils” after Mayor Landes suggested defunding them.²⁶ Even after city reformers ended Seattle’s police payoff system in the 1970s, tragic headlines of slain minority Seattleites were a frequent occurrence in Seattle. From the 1980s on, civil asset forfeiture laws allowed city cops to take and sell the belongings of Seattleites merely suspected of being involved in the drug trade. Norm Stamper, Seattle Police chief from 1994 to 2000, denounced the practice in his 2006 exposé about the culture of racism, misogyny, and violence in his former department. Seattle cops in 2012 were placed under a federal probe that lasted a decade because of the department’s habit of using force unconstitutionally.²⁷ If Seattleites couldn’t get justice in the courts or at city hall for a century of police abuse, they would seek it in the streets.

Tens of thousands of Seattleites protested in the summer of 2020, demanding that their elected officials direct funds from the city’s bloated police budget into housing, childcare, and other human services. They would avenge Seattleites—Seattleites of all colors—who had grave concerns about police misdeeds near Capitol Hill’s Cal Anderson Park ever since police criminalized youth of color who played baseball there in the 1900s. Some Seattleites seized the East Precinct near the park and established a “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” to watch abolitionist films and play stickball in. They said a city didn’t need overpolicing—or policing at all—to be safe. Almost as quickly as it emerged, however, their movement spawned a backlash.

At the height of the summer protests in 2020, members of the Seattle City Council pledged to defund the city’s police department by 50 percent, but they declined to follow through when the weather turned and Seattleites stopped protesting. In the November 2021 elections, candidates who pledged to uphold overinvestment in Seattle’s traditional model of policing swept their races in open seats against abolitionist and police reformist opponents, capturing the mayor’s office and an at-large city council seat.²⁸ In the race for Seattle city attorney, a onetime registered Republican and Trump supporter defeated abolitionist Democrat Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. A former linebacker at the University of Washington in the 1970s, Bruce Harrell was elected mayor of Seattle after campaigning on the absurd pledge to celebrate every week that the Seattle Police Department didn’t kill a Black person. The movement for police accountability had not only stalled but was reversed to such an extent that its opponents rode the backlash to power. Where had the momentum gone?

Seattle historian Roger Sale said in his 1976 book Seattle, Past to Present that “the failure of progressive politics lies in the failure of reformers to realize the chances they had to build a political base strong enough to fight interests that held power.”²⁹ Though he was speaking of the original Progressive Era, his words reverberate through many decades of progressive travail. Over and over in Seattle history, one sees progressives self-defeat by underestimating their own strength, potential run after potential run left in scoring position. Part of what made the 2021 Seattle elections so disheartening was the sense of missed opportunity. Leftist candidates had been handed a historic mandate by the civil rights protests of 2020. They faced significant headwind from right-wing media committed to making them look like scary radicals. They weren’t elected.

In 2019, I had run for city council as an abolitionist and also came up short, a year before the 2020 movement for police accountability bubbled over into the streets. Sitting with defeat, I realized it was easier to blame the electorate, the political landscape, and other circumstances outside of my control than it was to self-assess. I forced myself to review precinct data. A trend emerged: with the exception of the Wallingford precincts (a neighborhood in north Seattle), we won against all odds; areas where the campaign did well generally had lower voter turnout than those where it did poorly.³⁰ Additional time spent among our campaign’s natural base could have helped bridge the losing gap of four percentage points. Now, as in the past, latent left-of-center blocs have the potential to transform our cities.

In February 2023, with the city mired in what seemed a counterprogressive period of sociopolitical reaction, millennial and Gen-Z organizers in the House Our Neighbors coalition notched an improbable win: in a low-turnout special election, they convinced 57 percent of voting Seattleites to establish a public development authority to build public housing in the city. Opponents attacked the initiative as unrealistic and unfunded; they neglected to mention it would be paid for with the same mechanism—civic bonds—that had built many of Seattle’s sports facilities. The Seattle Times opposed the plan; the Initiative 135 campaign proved the paper wrong.³¹ Obstinate as ever, business interests in the city went on boosting privatized spectacles over public works. With Initiative 135 set to appear on Seattle ballots, Mayor Harrell proposed taking money from the city’s affordable housing revenue source and using it to boost sports tourism with the 2023 MLB All-Star Game and FIFA World Cup matches.³²

If the city’s history with the 1995 NCAA Final Four was any indication—when city police destroyed a homeless encampment and arrested antipoverty protestors—Seattle would prepare for these celebrations by attempting to sweep its issues under the rug. As they always had, Seattle sports simulated the city’s political climate, sometimes symbolizing progress and other times substantiating regression.

Seattleites should want to believe in progress. The idea that society moves inexorably in the direction of its own improvement is soothing. Bad things happen; people learn from them and make changes. They harbor memory of the time before reform, and promise to never return there. “We draw comfort from the idea that history is an autonomous moral force that can motivate action and set straight the record of human misdeeds,” historian Joan Wallach Scott writes.³³ But what if it doesn’t work this way? What if, as Scott ponders, “history [is] a process of contention and conflict, a story of struggles for power, with no sharp boundaries between past, present, and future”?³⁴ This would mean that past progressive gains could be undone. Mistakes could be repeated. People forget.

Seattle’s original progressive agenda at the turn of the twentieth century included environmental conservation, visionary urban planning, and closing the gap somewhat between the rich and the poor. Over time, groups excluded by the first progressives insisted on inclusion, adding to the agenda racial justice, worker rights, gender equity, the protection of sexual minorities. Wins were secured, rolled back, and reinforced. In politics, nobody wins forever. Ground can be lost, resetting social conditions that had been improved, and reopening questions that had already been settled. I’ve tried to illustrate in this book not the inevitability of progressive defeat but rather the repeated failure of a specific approach to reform: the approach that mortgages the long-term success of progressivism in favor of half measures that fail to inspire excitement, that reproduce social inequities, and that are more susceptible to defeat. The rise and fall of the cycling movement in the United States is a case in point.

Bikers transformed urban America in the age of reform. Seattle cyclists spearheaded paved streets, spurred some of the city’s first licensing and public space bureaucracies, and advanced the then-radical proposal of taxing city dwellers to pay for roads. But riding clubs were often segregated, were slow to accept women riders, and were often ableist.³⁵ As a result, reactionaries could falsely portray them as out-of-touch elites, then push anti-cycling sentiment as a Trojan horse to deflate the expansion of government action that biking represented. An anti-tax activist in 1897 denounced privileged riders for benefiting from taxing “shop girls, laborers, and impoverished invalids.”³⁶ Biking’s real and perceived exclusivity weakened it politically, exposing riders to car activists who continue shaping city terrain. The devastating impact is seen most clearly in Seattle’s disproportionately Black and brown neighborhoods, where sidewalks are scant, protected bike lanes are few and far between, and preventable pedestrian deaths occur more frequently than elsewhere in the city. “Progressive” exclusivity harms everybody, and no one more than the excluded.

Seattle institutions that have survived rightward political pendulum swings show that progressives win when they decide to create institutions that last. The public parks and libraries that Seattleites built during the Progressive Era can be policed, but they can’t be pulled out of the ground. With nowhere to go and nothing to do during the COVID-19 quarantine, Seattleites flocked increasingly to the playgrounds that progressives established during the age of reform. If they had to be rebuilt in later years, many of these institutions would be fought tooth and nail by some of the same people who use them. Even Seattle’s moderates and conservatives make use of the public beaches, public health-care centers, and public park improvements built by the New Deal in the 1930s. That these progressive improvements provoked a backlash shouldn’t prevent us from building more.

Why did Robert “Firebug” Driscoll burn down Seattle’s baseball stadium in 1932? What exactly made it an appealing target for white supremacist violence, its wooden stands the bane of a prolific arsonist who decided to incinerate them? Driscoll was a lumber worker who wanted more from a society that gave other white loggers tremendous benefits; he detested Black and Asian Seattleites who had jobs. A biographical sketch of Driscoll compiled by the Seattle Fire Department after his arrest indicates that he hated having to share space with racial minorities in integrated homeless encampments, where downtrodden men of all races got together to listen to Seattle baseball on the radio.³⁷ Firebug wanted to inflict as much pain as possible on the society that had cast him aside. He hit Seattle where he thought it would hurt most.

Firebug charred trains and industrial tracts to disrupt Seattle commerce and destroy its ambition. He burned schools, apartment complexes, and service centers for the disabled, hating that Seattle gave shelter and a safety net to others while seemingly denying them to him. Driscoll burned down Seattle’s baseball stadium because it gave the city joy; Seattleites got together there. More gathered around radios, listening closely as the melodic delivery of announcer Leo Lassen lifted them from their troubles during the Great Depression. Driscoll couldn’t stand it. Because he was suffering, everyone else had to. Baseball had to burn.

Seattle public safety officials could arrest Driscoll. They could sentence him to five-to-ten years in Walla Walla Penitentiary, and they could monitor him after his sentence was over to make sure he behaved himself. But they couldn’t smother his combustible prejudice, the perpetual flame that made him set fire to Seattle’s social fabric—the flame seen elsewhere in segregated neighborhoods, in golf courses that were off-limits to Seattle minorities, in racist policing. That fire smoldered in a sizable 1930s Nazi- sympathizer movement that had at least sixteen hundred members in Seattle in 1939, rekindling the KKK resurgence of a decade earlier.³⁸ The fire burned when hateful Seattleites voted down the city’s 1964 housing desegregation measure; it burned on and on when Seattleites opposed school integration in 1978, rescinded Seattle’s sanctuary city status in 1986, and stood by as Black churches fell to arson in the mid-1990s. This fire spawned local arch-conservative Christopher Rufo; it could be a “progressive” fire that criminalized sex workers, the homeless, and LGBTQ+ Seattleites but had no problem with heartless capitalists like Frederick Trump Sr. building their fortunes there.

Firebugs were everywhere in Seattle—some expressed themselves with tinder and flame, others with ballots and city ordinances. “I realize a man should live like the rest of decent society,” wrote Driscoll to Seattle officials from prison; “I should have retaliated lawfully.”

Some would have it that the proper response to a Firebug—that is, to the threat of targeted hate, mass shooters, and organized racists who command great power and influence—is to give up on the idea of a shared civic destiny, besieged as it is by threats on all sides. This viewpoint is evident mostly on Seattle’s left-of-center, where timid half measures are frequently allowed to masquerade as progress, and demographics that would transform the city are often hesitant to compete, scared of the heartbreak they believe to be inevitable. They prove themselves right by proving themselves right: self-defeatism reinforces itself, creating the conditions it needs to keep on self-defeating. Where fire can’t take out a great society directly, it does so through fear that prevents anything from ever getting made, ever being built, ever happening.

The way to stamp out the fire that feeds on exclusion is with more shared spaces like the baseball stadium that angered Firebug. It’s with the integrated city he couldn’t tolerate. It’s with strong, inclusive unions that raise the standard of living of all workers and encourage solidarity, and with social safety net protections that keep people from falling into poverty and alienation. It’s with collaborative institutions that are even enjoyed by people who claim to oppose them.

In 2022 the Washington State Legislature passed the Move Washington transit package, unlocking $4.3 billion in new spending for biking, mass transit, and accessible pedestrian improvements in a state where most individual counties vote Republican and where roughly 40 percent of the general population does the same.³⁹ Within weeks of the environmental subsidy’s passage, funding applications made by small towns in conservative areas fueled more than $457 million worth of total requests—over double the amount of the previous biennium. Move Washington was designed to advance “non-car modes of travel”; it found a political base in some of the most car-dependent, conservative areas of the state.

Even when Seattle doesn’t live up to its own inclusive pretentions, those pretentions resonate elsewhere. In late 2022, observers noted the explosive rise nationally of pickleball, calling attention to “its potential to bring diverse populations together around the common goal of recreation and fitness.”⁴⁰ Is it any wonder that the game originated in scenic Bainbridge Island, from which the Seattle skyline can be seen on a sunny day? Grassroots support exists everywhere for the uncommon mix of outdoor spaces and urban amenity that defines Seattle—a heritage seen in Progressive Era bike paths, city trails and playgrounds, and publicly subsidized sports.

The Seattle Seahawks, Mariners, and Sounders were all made possible by public elections for new stadiums. The Seattle Storm won all their pre-2020 championships in the once-public facility inhabited by the Seattle Kraken during the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs. University of Washington football is straightforwardly state property. Inevitably during nationally televised games in Seattle featuring any of these teams, commentators call attention to the city’s immaculate scenery and “game-day atmosphere.” Droves of fans near the football, soccer, and baseball stadiums in Pioneer Square spill onto Royal Brougham Way, sauntering on the street named for Seattle’s sports godfather in the 1970s. The culture of college-like enthusiasm for professional sports in Seattle is the result of having four major athletic facilities all in city limits, all near primary transit hubs of greater or lesser size, all in some of the most accessible neighborhoods in the city. Fans watch sports to see normal human limits defied; in Seattle those defied limits include inherited bad ideas of what a city should look like.

A forever city is still achievable—not as a dull errand into an uncertain wilderness, but as a joyous exhibition authored by people united in pursuit of common purpose. The game plan for permanent progressive victory has been laid out over a long legacy of lesson-worthy losses and enduring wins. To take from Seattle the civic riches handed down by activists past would be to take what makes the city a city at all. But if faded glories are all we have to look forward to, generations hence will look upon Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena like we do the dusted aqueducts of ancient Rome.

Unfinished bike lanes won’t age as well as the Colosseum.