INTRODUCTION
Seattle Unsettled
On June 6, 1927, sixteen-year-old Frank Kubo stepped off the Arabia-Maru, a transpacific steamship, and onto the docks in Seattle. The three-week journey from Yokohama had seemed endless to Frank, who spent the bulk of the trip seasick, unable to eat or sleep. Frank had taken this journey once before, in reverse, as a child. His mother and father were among the first Japanese migrants to arrive in Auburn, a rural town on the outskirts of Seattle. They worked as tenant farmers for several years before going bankrupt and losing the farm, their only source of income. With their dreams of wealth and prosperity in the United States no longer possible, they returned to Japan with Frank, then six years old, and his younger brother and sister. A US citizen by birth, Frank grew up in Japan, spoke no English, and held only the faintest memories of his birthplace. As he approached adulthood, however, Frank wanted to return to the United States to pursue his studies. Against his father’s wishes, he purchased a ticket on the Arabia-Maru, which left Yokohama and arrived in Seattle on a clear spring day.1
Frank’s uncle came to greet him at the docks and led him to a place called the New Home Hotel, located several blocks away. There, Frank dropped off his belongings and wondered what to do next. “Since it was already summer all the schools were closed,” he recalled. “My uncle therefore took me to Nishimura Employment Office to apply for an Alaskan salmon cannery job.” The next week, he hopped on another steamship, this one filled with Japanese men of all ages who were headed to work in Petersburg, Alaska. After two months, the salmon runs died down and the cannery slowed its operation, and Frank returned to Seattle with $120 cash. After paying his uncle and sending money back to Japan, Frank was left with very little. School would have to wait. Frank set out to find more work to support himself and his family. He was quickly hired by a Japanese import company and traveled around the region peddling food and supplies to Japanese labor camps. Weeks turned into months, which turned into years: summers in Alaska, fall and spring on the road, and winters in the Seattle hotels and lodging houses.2
Frank’s life of continual movement was not uncommon for the era’s working-class urban residents across the American West. As environmental historian William Cronon has argued, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cities developed as economic centers that controlled vast regional hinterlands devoted to resource extraction and agriculture. Cronon traces the resulting flow of raw materials in and out of Chicago, which became a gateway city connecting western resources with eastern markets.3 Though Cronon focuses mainly on commodities, the same system applied to workers. As cities extended their economic reach outward, they created linkages for the regional circulation of people. Just as commodities moved in and out, so too did individuals. This phenomenon was especially pronounced along the Pacific Coast, where ports allowed access to wider networks of labor. Migrants moved through cities constantly, in search of jobs or else on their way to mining sites and agricultural camps ringing the urban centers.
Workers like Frank played a key role in building cities, but their historical presence has gone largely unacknowledged in urban scholarship. As a field, urban history has devoted considerable attention to workers’ lives and the emergence of an industrial working class in the period after the Civil War and before World War II.4 These discussions have focused overwhelmingly on Chicago, New York, and a handful of other industrial centers, although recent scholarship has diversified considerably in terms of geography as well as race and region.5 Still, the typical urban experience during this period is presented as a process of permanent settlement: a one-way migration to the cities in search of jobs, and the formation of neighborhoods, communities, and institutions. This gives the impression of a working-class population as stable, rooted in place, and skewed mostly toward the white male factory worker. A large literature does exist on loggers, miners, agricultural workers, and others who labored in the extractive and seasonal industries across the American West; however, they are almost exclusively discussed in terms of rurality and associated with nonurban environments.6
This absence is particularly glaring in the case of Seattle, a city quite literally built around the movement of workers.7 From the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s, Seattle’s urban economy became tightly intertwined with the broader regional economy of the Pacific Northwest, which revolved around industries such as logging and lumber processing, fishing, salmon canning, coal mining, and agriculture.8 The regional economy’s demand for highly mobile labor brought successive waves of workers through Seattle, which served as an ever-expanding hub of local, regional, and transnational migrations. In the 1920s, an academic study estimated that Seattle had one of the highest transient populations in the entire country.9 When he arrived in 1927, Frank joined a migratory labor stream as old as Seattle itself; in camps, forests, and hotels in and around the city, Indigenous, Asian, European, and US-born white workers came into contact and conflict with one another.
Reorienting our study of the urban past around workers like Frank, who passed through or resided in the city temporarily, reveals an entire class of laborers often ignored in urban scholarship—and also highlights the structural forces that made them itinerant in the first place. Seattle’s urban growth and development required the constant disruption and uprooting of people, beginning with the dispossession of the Duwamish, the first people of Seattle, and their displacement to the southern edge of the city for the purposes of labor. This book traces how the city was structured—spatially, socially, economically, and politically—around this demand for mobile labor, a pool of available workers able to move from place to place. Urban life during this period was one of profound dislocation for the poor and itinerant laborers of the Pacific Northwest. Centering their experiences exposes the exclusionary roots of the city’s rise as a modern metropolis, dramatically shifting our understanding of Seattle history.
EMPIRE AND MIGRATION IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
Seattle is best understood as a Pacific city, situated at the heart of a maritime network that revolves around the Pacific Ocean.10 This link to the sea is palpable from anywhere in the city, the smell of saltwater or call of seagulls offering a constant reminder of Seattle’s maritime roots. While the city itself doesn’t directly touch the Pacific Ocean—it’s not a coastal city in that sense—it is connected to the Pacific through the Salish Sea, which links the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia, the Puget Sound in Washington State, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and many smaller inlets, forming a vast marine space that flows into the ocean. Seattle occupies a central location within the Salish Sea, easily accessible by water.11 It sits along the eastern shore of the Puget Sound and serves as a connection point for the many river systems of the Cascade mountain range. In Lushootseed, the language of the region’s Indigenous peoples, Seattle was known as dᶻidᶻəlalič, or the place where one crosses over.12
Too often, we understand the history of the American West as a linear process that follows the movement of settlers from east to west. The railroad figures centrally within this national mythology, presenting white settlement as a foregone conclusion and associating the “real” origins of Western cities with the introduction of railway technology. In the Pacific Northwest, however, water played a far more crucial role in the development of urban societies and capitalist economies. Seattle’s maritime geography integrated the city into a Pacific-oriented economy, bringing it closer to Asia and the Pacific world than to the rest of the continental United States. The unique maritime environment of the Pacific Northwest, and Seattle’s location within it, allowed for the movement of people and goods before the arrival of the railroad. During the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the largest markets for Pacific Northwest lumber, the region’s most lucrative export, were all accessible by water and included California and Hawaii.13
Highlighting these “Pacific connections” reveals more than just a new geography. It also brings the question of empire to the forefront. Moving beyond the borders of the nation and situating Seattle’s history within a Pacific framework helps clarify the imperial context of the city’s growth and its enmeshment with the broader dynamics of US empire-building. As historian Kornel Chang has pointed out, the Pacific Northwest’s capitalist development was shaped by imbricated processes of empire. While historians have tended to study US empire in two district phases—continental expansion on one hand and overseas expansion on the other—Chang argues that the two were mutually reinforcing, with “the development of one being utterly dependent on the development of the other.”14 The capitalist economy required both land and labor, as well as markets to absorb lumber, coal, and other Pacific Northwest commodities. The invasion of sovereign Indigenous nations and military incursions into Asia formed the basis of what scholar Manu Karuka calls the imperial economy, which we see very clearly taking root in Seattle during this period.15
Bringing empire to the forefront reveals the intersecting histories of Indigenous and Asian peoples in the region and their role in building the city. For Indigenous peoples, the economy’s orientation around maritime networks opened up a space of autonomy within the growing constraints of colonial society. While the formation of the economy in the Pacific Northwest relied upon the colonization of Indigenous lands, Indigenous people didn’t simply disappear. As maritime peoples, they remained present in the seasonal workforce, often living and working alongside settlers and other migrant laborers. Grouped under the designation “Coast Salish,” which has been used to identify commonalities of language and culture among peoples of the coastal Northwest (running from Washington through British Columbia), Puget Sound Indigenous inhabitants also formed their own distinctive and autonomous tribal societies.16 This included the Duwamish, the first people of Seattle, who moved along the waters of the Puget Sound during spring, summer, and fall, fishing, socializing, and resource gathering, while residing in permanent villages during the winter months. Their maritime mobility persisted well after the arrival of the first white settlers and helps to explain the high participation of Duwamish and other Coast Salish peoples in the wage economy. As historian Paige Raibmon argues, the seasonal nature of the industries, including fishing, canning, and agriculture, and the location of the various worksites along rivers and coastal areas allowed Indigenous peoples to weave “political and cultural imperatives into their travel itineraries,” while also earning wages.17
As the Duwamish and other Coast Salish peoples became more integrated into the wage economy, they encountered Asian workers whose migration and arrival to the Pacific Northwest also took place within a maritime world.18 The expansion of Western imperialism and military aggression across Asia beginning in the mid-nineteenth century created the conditions for mass emigration, disrupting traditional economies, destabilizing political systems, and impoverishing and uprooting millions of people.19 At the same time, the US pursuit of Asian markets created financial linkages and migration routes that pulled successive waves of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino laborers to the Pacific Northwest, where they were funneled into the low-wage, seasonal workforce.20 As the region secured greater connections with Asia and the Pacific world, Seattle emerged as a crucial hub of Asian migration and labor: from the 1860s to 1880s with Chinese migration, the 1890s to 1910s with Japanese migration, and, finally, the 1920s to 1930s with Filipino migration. During this period, Asian laborers worked in the same industries and traversed the same maritime networks as their Indigenous counterparts. They labored alongside one another, competed over jobs, and forged unexpected alliances within the marine and coastal spaces of the Puget Sound.
The maritime orientation of the economy and the movement of Indigenous and Asian laborers through it laid the groundwork for a larger system of labor migration and recruitment that also drew in Europeans and US-born whites, who came in growing numbers beginning around the turn of the twentieth century. Scholarship on Seattle history has not really examined the presence of European and white laborers within these regional circuits of migration. Some work has been done on so-called “hobos,” single men who traveled widely around the American West in search of jobs, but these studies don’t connect to the bigger picture of migratory labor that also included Indigenous and Asian workers.21 Most white and European laborers who arrived in Seattle during this time were also migrants, moving around from place to place and working in the same kinds of seasonal or temporary jobs. They did not fit the image of the stable factory worker so dominant in the scholarship on the urban white working class. In fact, their very uprootedness and nonconformity to settled family life cast them as suspicious and potentially disruptive to the social order.22
These Indigenous, Asian, European, and white workers often converged in Seattle, which anchored a much larger regional network of migration and labor. Within the city, they made their way to the district south of Yesler Way, along the waterfront, where they found temporary accommodations, entertainment venues, cafés, bathhouses, employment agencies, and other businesses that popped up to serve the mobile workforce. The name of this area changed many times over the years, from the Sawdust to the Tenderloin to simply “below the line” (meaning “below Yesler Way”), reflecting its constantly changing population.23 Though the district played a central role in the broader economy by concentrating the workforce into one bounded area, it also was a heterogeneous, highly fluid urban environment. Laborers and migrants of all kinds mixed and mingled with Indigenous and Asian residents, single men and women, interracial families, sex workers, and the poor and unemployed. The district defied easy categorization, forged through the shifting and unstable demands of a Pacific-oriented economy and the maritime routes that sustained it.
COLONIAL ROOTS OF SEGREGATION
Seattle’s urban landscape developed around the segregation and containment of this south-end district. Segregation dominates the literature on race in US cities, often through discussions of redlining. As the Great Depression created massive financial instability and caused many Americans to lose their homes, the federal government became more involved in the housing sector via the New Deal, creating various programs to assist first-time homebuyers and those who could no longer pay their mortgages. These programs, however, produced racial segregation by denying home loans and other financial support to those who lived in “redlined” districts, neighborhoods deemed risky financial investments and thus undesirable for federal loans. As scholars have found, the real estate agents and mortgage brokers who contracted with the federal government to produce these assessments almost always measured Black and other nonwhite and immigrant neighborhoods as “risks,” making it almost impossible for these groups to obtain home loans. Coupled with other mechanisms of racial exclusion, redlining trapped nonwhite people in poorly resourced districts, a process that greatly accelerated after World War II.24
In Seattle, though, redlining tells only part of the story. Though Seattle has its own ugly history of redlining, which deserves far more attention than it currently receives, the process of segregation started much earlier, with the founding of the city itself in the mid-nineteenth century, and did not involve the federal government. At that time, white settlers removed the Duwamish people and segregated them in the southern fringes of the city, eager to take their lands but also to make them available as workers.25 Settlers even blocked efforts by the federal government to create a reservation for the Duwamish on their ancestral homelands because it would interfere with the city’s access to a steady labor supply.26 Seattle did not have reliable land-based transportation until the late nineteenth century, and even then water remained a primary mode of transportation, making the Duwamish and other Coast Salish peoples a valuable source of labor. Marked as a disorderly slum, the south end became a container for all of the city’s racialized and marginalized populations, which, in turn, served to further mark them as undesirable and unworthy for inclusion into urban society. This included Asian migrants, who were also restricted south of Yesler Way, and single male laborers, whose deviation from normative family life also made them racially suspect in the eyes of the settler elites. Seattle’s urban landscape developed around this north-south orientation, with the north as a “residence district” for white families and the south as a stigmatized slum district for the city’s heterogeneous workforce.
This example reveals the colonial roots of racial segregation, as well as the function of racial segregation in forming the urban and regional economy. The south end was not a stable district with a racially defined population, but one that constantly changed according to the needs of the broader economy and the kinds of workers available at that particular moment. In this way, Seattle shares historical commonalities with Vancouver, Melbourne, and other cities across the Anglophone Pacific world that developed in the mid-nineteenth century around resource-based economies reliant upon Indigenous lands and the mass influx of Asian and European labor.27 In these contexts, segregation occurred as part of a colonial project to remove the Indigenous inhabitants and establish the city as a pure space of white domestic life.28 As Asian and European migrants, many of them single men, arrived to work in extractive economies, spaces such as reserves and slums served to contain Indigenous and racially mixed populations and mark them as unruly, troublesome, and antithetical to modern urban life. As sociologist Renisa Mawani has discussed in the case of Vancouver, settlers relied upon a racially mixed workforce to build the economy but also feared the possibility of the interracial solidarities and alliances this mixing could generate. She calls this the “deep paradox” of a colonial society rooted in both capitalist accumulation and racial purity.29 In Seattle, the north-south spatial orientation served to smooth over this tension between, on one hand, racial heterogeneity as demanded by capitalist accumulation and the ever-expanding search for labor and, on the other, racial purity as envisioned by white settlers. It allowed settlers to maintain an exclusionary white district while also accommodating an Indigenous and racially mixed labor force.
Comprehending Seattle’s racial past requires an expansive framework— one that takes into account the intersections and overlaps among the various groups dominating the labor force during this period. Studies of Seattle history haven’t fully captured this dynamic. Scholars in recent years have made great strides in uncovering a more diverse Seattle history: Shelley Lee and Dorothy Fujita-Rony, for instance, have both situated Seattle within a transpacific context, showing the importance of Asia to the city’s urban development.30 Quintard Taylor has examined the long history of African Americans in Seattle, from the city’s earliest days through the late twentieth century.31 While these and other books have done crucial work in contesting the long-held image of Seattle as an exclusively white city, they remain grounded in their respective community histories.32 Seattle from the Margins builds on this scholarship, widening the scope to explore the heterogeneous and constantly shifting nature of the regional workforce and urban population. The historical experiences of one group were entirely dependent upon the others, in terms of their daily lives and social encounters as well as their shared marginalization within the city. This is not to equate Indigenous dispossession with other forms of uprootedness experienced by non-Indigenous migrant laborers; the dispossession of the first peoples of the region remains ongoing, not an unfortunate event that occurred long ago. But bringing all of these groups together within one framework helps to emphasize the colonial foundations of Seattle’s economy and spatial organization, which created a structure of exclusion that persisted well beyond the city’s founding and laid the groundwork for later forms of racial segregation.
Returning to Seattle’s origins is the only way to really understand the persistence of segregation over time. Segregation was not something imposed on the city by the federal government; instead it evolved from the first days of Seattle’s founding in the mid-nineteenth century. White settlers established the north for the purposes of wealth accumulation via land and private property, then sought to protect this space through violence, policing, and municipal law. They dispossessed and displaced the Duwamish, rendering them outsiders in their own lands, then excluded others deemed racially undesirable, including Asian migrants, interracial families, and single men. As Black workers began to arrive in growing numbers during World War II, they entered a racial geography that had already hardened around the division between white and nonwhite, north and south. Though Seattle’s Black community predated the war, Asians and Indigenous peoples outnumbered them in the city and the regional workforce. This changed during the war years, as the economy shifted and African Americans became the most dominant nonwhite group.33 Their growing presence in the city provoked renewed hostility and violence, and Black residents found themselves restricted from the same northern white districts. Seattle’s enduring division into north and south shows the layers of colonialism and racism that were woven into the city’s foundations—forces that continue to structure socioeconomic inequalities into the present.
AUTONOMY AND INTIMACY ON THE MARGINS
Seattle is fascinating from a historical perspective because of the messiness and complexity of urban life, and the fluid social worlds forged among the city’s poor and working classes. But excavating a history of movement, disruption, and uprootedness is a complicated project. Seattle’s dynamism and constantly shifting urban population is precisely what makes the city a challenging case for historians—and also why, I suspect, Seattle has remained off the radar for urban history as a field. As scholar Nayan Shah has pointed out, historians have long privileged permanence over transience, tracing people’s lives and relationships according to stable communities rooted in place. The archive plays a role in shaping this bias toward permanence. People who remained stationary have a much stronger presence in the archives, as they tended to accumulate a long paper trail: property deeds, leases, marriage certificates, and payroll records.34 People on the move often circulated outside of the official realm, leaving historians with little evidence of their presence in urban areas.35
This bias has also skewed historical scholarship toward middle-class and elite perspectives, particularly among the marginalized. In communities facing diminished access to resources and more economic and racial barriers to stability, individuals who lived in single-family homes or secured stable jobs were comparatively privileged. Because their voices appear more often in institutional and community archives, they receive more attention and their experience becomes understood as a universal experience among that group, excluding the migrants, the poor, and the transient working class from historical memory.
With this class bias also comes a gender bias toward nuclear families and normative domestic life. Moving around on the migratory labor circuit brought people together in ways that did not conform to traditional family structures. Shah refers to this as “stranger intimacy”: the fleeting encounters between transient men and the diverse forms of kinship, including interracial relationships, that flourished along the migratory routes of the American West.36 These migratory laborers included married men and men with children who worked in seasonal jobs, in agriculture or canning, that took them away from their families for months on end, or required them to move from place to place with their families. Single and married women also worked as migrant laborers, particularly in Puget Sound agriculture. In these cases, too, the picture of settled family life does not accurately capture the social realities of many laboring people at the time.
To piece together this history, Seattle from the Margins turns to the built environment as an archive containing alternative stories of migration and labor in the Pacific Northwest.37 It looks at the worksites, residences, and leisure establishments that popped up in and around Seattle to serve the mobile workforce and facilitate their seasonal migrations. These sites— labor camps, lumber towns, lodging houses, hotels, and so-called slum districts—played a crucial role in the functioning of the urban and regional economy; they also brought together a diverse and constantly shifting workforce. Through the guest book of a hotel, we can see the heterogeneity of the urban population as well as the different waves of migration that passed through Seattle over time. Floor plans, building descriptions, and photographs reveal living and working conditions. These sources help repopulate the historical record with new actors, illuminating a view of urban life that does not take the settled middle-class experience as universal.
The sites that served this itinerant workforce also provoked reactions among elites and other powerful people who viewed them as hotbeds of labor radicalism and racial disorder. Of particular concern was the possibility of interracial alliances among laboring populations that could destabilize the functioning of an economy rooted in racial hierarchy and division. Companies, city leaders, urban planners, and others spent considerable time and effort policing and reforming these spaces. They sought to transform housing and work environments as a form of labor discipline and control. The single-room occupancy hotel (SRO), for example, emerged in the early twentieth century to separate workers into their own rooms.38 Before this, laborers and migrants occupied smaller wooden lodging houses that lacked clear room divisions and could be easily altered from inside. SROs were constructed with more durable materials and planned in a uniform style that could be more easily inspected. In this case and others, building design served to separate workers and give them less autonomy in their interactions with each other.
The built environment, then, reflects tension between the economic necessity of these spaces and the problems they posed to the city’s ruling order. Despite their efforts to police, regulate, and reform sites like lodging houses and labor camps, company owners and city authorities couldn’t fully control what the workers were doing and how they chose to live their lives. Even after city officials embraced the SRO-style hotel as an attempt to impose order onto unruly urban populations, residents responded by altering the interiors to suit their own needs.39 They created social worlds that existed outside of official or elite knowledge and continued to inhabit these spaces on their own terms. It was precisely this pursuit of autonomy that so confounded and disturbed municipal authorities, industry leaders, reformers, and urban planners. In these and many other ways, migrants, laborers, and other “undesirables” played a far greater role in shaping the urban environment than previously acknowledged.
URBAN HISTORY UNBOUND
This book attempts to reexamine Seattle’s history from the margins, focusing on people and places deemed unworthy and undesirable and tracing the social, economic, and political processes by which they were rendered as such. Doing so, however, requires bending, and even completely breaking, many of the rules by which urban histories are often written. For one thing, much of the book’s action takes place outside of the city. Out of the six chapters, only three occur within city boundaries, while the remaining chapters focus on outlying areas around Puget Sound, including the Puyallup and White River valleys, the Puget Sound lumber towns of Port Gamble and Mukilteo, and Bainbridge Island. The choice to zoom in and out throughout the text is deliberate. As a city, Seattle’s urban development was linked inextricably with the broader economy of the Pacific Northwest. Focusing only on the city proper would not convey the full story of how this economic system came to be, nor how it was lived and experienced by the workers who made it possible. Much of the urban labor force did not reside in Seattle permanently, and confining Seattle history to the city’s official boundaries would render these workers invisible. By playing with scale, from the hyperlocal to the regional and transnational, this book is able to connect the history of migratory labor with the history of urbanization in a way that also attends to the lives and labors of those on the ground.
Another unconventional feature of the book is that it doesn’t follow one group of people over time. It doesn’t even follow two groups of people and their interactions with each other over time. It focuses instead on the rise and eventual decline of the extractive and seasonal economy, and how the demand for migratory labor shaped Seattle’s urban landscape. Not every community, organization, movement, or event will be covered in these pages; rather than offering a comprehensive view of Seattle’s social history, the book will focus on the groups most dominant in the workforce at particular moments, examining the specific anxieties they provoked among the city’s elites, industry leaders, and officials.
Seattle’s working-class population was not static but shaped through multiple, ongoing waves of migration that reflected local, regional, and transpacific spheres of power. As immigration laws transformed the workforce via successive prohibitions on labor migration, first from Asia and then globally, employers embarked on an ever-expanding search for low-wage labor. Given Seattle’s Pacific connections, the book focuses in particular on Asian migration, and Asian laborers’ interactions over time with Indigenous and European laborers; it also draws specific contrasts between Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino residents, who arrived at different historical moments and within varying geopolitical contexts that greatly shaped their experiences and opportunities—even as they shared a racial status as perpetual foreigners and disposable laborers.
The book begins with Seattle’s founding in the 1850s and traces its early economic and geographic development through the 1880s. The first chapter sets the stage by establishing the city’s racial geography as rooted in the dispossession of the Duwamish and their containment to the southern district for the purposes of labor. This southern district, in turn, served to segregate the Chinese as they began to arrive as workers in the 1860s and 1870s, joining the Duwamish in powering the urban economy. The significance of the south end only grew as Seattle transformed into a hub of labor migration for the Puget Sound region’s first major agricultural industry, hop cultivation.
The second chapter follows Indigenous and Chinese workers, concentrated in Seattle, who became the backbone of the agricultural workforce from the 1860s through the 1880s, as growers organized their farms around the Sound’s maritime networks. This chapter looks specifically at the intersecting histories of Chinese and Indigenous labor, examining how the expulsion of Chinese people from the region through mob violence and immigration restriction impacted Indigenous agricultural workers throughout and beyond the Puget Sound.
The third and fourth chapters move from the 1890s through the 1920s as Seattle began to extend its reach into the broader region and across the Pacific. While the Puget Sound hop-growing experiment was rather shortlived, it laid the foundation for Seattle as a labor migration and recruitment hub that other industries, notably lumber, utilized. Chapter 3 examines how the industry drew on a growing foreign-born population in Seattle, one that included Japanese and Northern European migrants, to create a highly exploitative employment system of constant turnover and disposability—a system that also became unmanageable in the face of worker discontent and the possibility of interracial solidarity. Chapter 4 looks at the role of Japanese business operators in sustaining the housing industry in the form of hotel management. Hotels housed much of the urban working-class population in Seattle and became the city’s most dominant housing form during the early twentieth century; sociologist Norman Hayner found that Seattle had the second highest concentration of hotel rooms per resident in the entire country by the 1920s.40 As Japanese hoteliers grew more dominant in the industry and began to expand beyond the south end, city officials deployed the fire and building departments to police and harass them.
Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the decline of the resource-based economy beginning in the 1930s, as Seattle turned to aerospace and airplane building in a shift that transformed the labor force and urban landscape. With immigration restrictions cutting off the flow of labor from Asia and much of the globe, Filipino migrants became a desirable labor source for agricultural, canning, and other industries. As colonial subjects of the United States, which had annexed and colonized the Philippines following the Spanish-American War and Philippine-American War, Filipinos could legally enter the country, but the timing of their arrival in the 1920s and 1930s coincided with the onset of the Great Depression and a surge of nativist hostility that left many struggling economically and forced to travel great distances in search of jobs. Chapter 5 focuses on Filipino laborers’ employment by Japanese farmers and their relationships with Indigenous agricultural workers, many of them young Coast Salish women from Canada. These Japanese farms represented some of the last areas of agricultural activity around Puget Sound; much of the industry had moved over the Cascade mountains to the eastern half of the state, reflecting a broader decline of resource extraction as the foundation of the urban and regional economy. Chapter 6 concludes the story of migratory labor in Seattle by examining the slum clearance projects of the late 1930s and early 1940s that targeted migrant neighborhoods for demolition, including Seattle’s Hooverville, a shantytown near the waterfront, and Profanity Hill, a racially integrated area of single male laborers, Japanese and interracial families, and female-headed households. These demolition projects made way for a new workforce and a new city.
The book ends with World War II, when Seattle’s economy shifted away from resource extraction and toward manufacturing, propelling acts of displacement against the migrant laborers and others who had once powered the seasonal industries. The expulsion of Japanese Americans from Seattle following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, is also part of this story. Though Japanese people had played a crucial role in running many of the small businesses that catered to the region’s itinerant working-class population, they were no longer as useful to the city by the late 1930s. Wartime hysteria unleashed after Pearl Harbor created a flashpoint within a longer economic transformation that had rendered Seattle’s Japanese population expendable. Later, Black migrants who arrived during and after World War II would face similar patterns of restriction and exclusion as previous populations who helped build the city—demonstrating how much Seattle’s early history continued to reverberate into the postwar period and far beyond.