Shameful History

The Salem Witch Trials

Abigail William's had been acting very peculiar. It was a cold winter in 1692, but that didn't explain why she was flapping her arms like a bird around the house and screaming that a witch was trying to get her. Her neighbors were shocked by her behavior and soon other children were acting in a similar fashion, claiming that they were possessed by witches. This began one of the infamous incidents in American history, and by the time it was all over 19 men and women plus two dogs were executed for witchcraft. The mass hysteria caused another 55 people to repent their sins and an additional 130 people awaited trial for witchcraft before the whole thing was over. The incident started when Abigail, and her nine year old cousin Elizabeth, read a book about witches by Cotton Mather. The two girls blamed their slave Tituba, who hailed from Barbados, for the whole thing. Tituba believed the only way she could avoid hanging was to plead guilty to the charges. She spoke about an encounter with a thin white man who showed her a book with the names of nine Salem witches in it. This impossible story led to the witch hunt that followed.

Tales of witches were not new. In the 14 century, several thousands of people had been executed because of their suspected witchcraft. Witches had appeared in European folklore, including the old bard William Shakespeare, throughout the 15th century. Ten people had been hanged for witchcraft in England in 1600, so the idea of witches was not that strange in 1692. But the actions of children who came to understand that they could accuse anyone of witchcraft was quite different. The witch hunts moved forward and no one was safe. Critics of the hunt complained that all of those who were accused had some previous dispute with the children or their families. The whole thing took on a bizarre life of its own as people started to confess to the charges so that they could avoid the hangmen's noose. The trials began on June 2 and the newly appointed judges soon became part of the hysteria. Race became part of the proceedings as one accuser claimed that a woman named Goody Nurse had brought a black man with her claiming he was there to cause her to "tempt god."

The judges and the jury ignored all defense evidence even if the evidence proved the defendants innocence. When a few people were acquitted the children began to scream again and the judges soon ordered new trials where they were soon found guilty. The hangings began on July 19th while the jails of Salem became so full that suspected witches had to be transferred to other towns. The trial became an outrage to many but the last straw was when the children accused the governor's wife of witchcraft. The governor was furious and a special grand jury was convened to deal with the situation. They quickly threw out more than a hundred charges of witchcraft. The court system was overhauled and drastically improved, as it would have been hard to be any worse, and the testimony of children began to be suspected. America would see many witch hunts in the future. They would take on different forms, but that mob mentality became a part of American culture. The McCarthy/Nixon era of the 1950's would be worse, but our history is full of stories of irrational mass behavior. This was only the beginning.

Source: Infamous Trials - Bruce Chadwick

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

At the turn of the century working conditions in the United States were appalling. In 1904, over 25,000 people were killed on the job and no place else were these conditions more deplorable than in New York's garment industry. Here young women toiled from dawn to dusk. One New York women described "dangerously broken stairways, windows few and dirty" and people being forced to work seventy or eighty hours a week. The women at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company had seen enough and in the winter of 1909, they decided to go out on strike.

The Union felt that if they could get three thousand workers to go out on strike. They would be successful. The union succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of their leaders when 20,000 women joined the strike. Black women and white women worked together against scabs, the police and the threats of imprisonment to defeat the companies. They read poetry to each other to improve their morale:

"Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew.
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many..they are few."

But despite their efforts, the conditions did not change that much and on March 25, 1911, a fire swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. The fire raged on through the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors. While half of the city's workforce spent their working days above the 7th floor. The fire departments ladders only went up to the 7th floor. Trapped women died at their workstations, or were crushed in the panic. Some jumped out the window to their deaths. The New York World described the scene:

"Screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothes ablaze. The hair of some women steamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact that on both Greene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying."

By the end of the day, 146 workers were dead. The city lay in shock and a memorial parade down Broadway drew over 100,000 marchers. There was widespread revulsion over the tragedy. But the owners, politicians and many newspapers condemned any intervention by government. The courts consistently ruled in favor of the owners and many in government felt they were powerless to do anything. The owners of the factory were charged with manslaughter and while they were later acquitted. A judge in 1914 ordered them to pay $75 to the families of the deceased.

The city gathered information about the fire for the Factory Investigating Commission and gave the mayor of New York, Robert F. Wagner, additional powers to improve factory safety. The event stands as one of the most vivid symbols of the American labor movement to this day. The Triangle Fire serves as a reminder that worker safety laws are necessary to ensure a safe working place for all Americans. We should never roll back worker safety laws; the blood of American workers has already paid the price for these laws.

Sources: Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States Yale University Press,
The Encyclopedia of New York City

Media, Prejudice and Zoot Suits

Every wave of immigration the US has experienced was accompanied by racial prejudice and poverty for the immigrating ethnic group. Far from being a land of open arms to free oppressed people from all over the world, too often economic imperatives have made it necessary for the US to let the "people in."

Such was (and still is) the case for the Mexican-American immigration scene. But US need for immigration is for another day. Today we look at the media, which has always contributed to a one dimensional view of these new immigrants. These images have contributed to creating a climate of hate.

The Mexican-American image today owes much of that image to fashion. In the 1940's, a particular style of fashion, known as the Zoot Suit, became popular among young people in the Mexican community. Because of their unified taste in clothing, the media began to call this group of Mexicans gang members. This was, at best, incorrect. Although some of the "Zoot Suiters" were gang members, most were just out to have a good time and look good. The Mexican-Americans in 1941 were for the most part were poor and left out of the American dream. Their average income was $792 dollars a year. Poverty and its hand maiden, discrimination, were the root causes for the way they were treated and viewed as a group.

The Office of War Information described the living conditions of the Mexican-Americans in a classified report in 1942: "These people do not live, they exist. Malnutrition, sickness and disease are prevalent among them. Their housing, both in and out of cities, is the worst in the nation. The schools they attend are frequently segregated and generally inferior."

The problems described in the report had already begun to take its toll in Los Angles. The police in Los Angles were corrupt, brutal and racist. Police Captain Edward Duran Ayres stated, "Mexicans generally preferred to kill, or at least let a person bleed. Their propensity for violence could be traced to the predominance of Indian blood in their racial composition." The media generally went along with these racist descriptions and denounced the "Zoot Suiters" as unpatriotic threats to society.

On June 3, 1943, after fights between soldiers and Zoot Suiters developed, hundreds of servicemen began to go on a rampage. They invaded movie theaters and often removed the clothing off those who looked like Zoot Suiters. The marines wielded clubs, belts and iron pipes. A twelve year old, who had received a broken jaw, described the scene, "Who the hell are they fighting, the Japs or us?" Another young man said, "Hell man, this is a street in Germany tonight."

The police stood by and watched, often praising the attackers, as did the media. A Los Angles Times headline story stated: ZOOT SUITERS LEARN LESSON IN FIGHTS WITH SERVICEMEN.

The city council of Los Angles blamed the victims of the attacks and passed a resolution saying: "Now, therefore, be it resolved, that the City Council finds that the wearing of Zoot Suits constitutes a public nuisance and does hereby instruct the City Attorney to prepare an ordinance to prohibit the wearing of Zoot Suits."

The Zoot Suit riots remain an important lesson for all Americans about how racial and ethnic differences, strengthened by bias in the press, can lead to violence and misunderstandings.

Minorities and the FBI

By Denis Mueller

The FBI has a dismal record when it comes to African-Americans and its past is one of continuing violations of civil liberties. While ignoring lynchings, and claiming that they had no authority to protect the rights of black citizens, the Justice Department was quick to turn the victims of racial injustice into suspects. When President Wilson went to the Versailles peace conference his Justice Department was collecting data on those who complained about lynching. So much for the propaganda about making the world safe for democracy.

Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, asked senator Henry Cabot Lodge to read the 13th and 14th amendment of the US Constitution into the treaty proceedings, which then caused a young investigator for the Justice Department named J. Edgar Hoover to monitor those who complained. Those who preached social equality were threats to the Wilson administration. Remember this was the man who made segregation the official position of the government.

The FBI planted informants in all groups that advocated justice. What is worse is that these groups were called communists for their efforts to seek justice under our Constitution. Hoover concluded "the Reds have done a vast amount of evil damage by carrying doctrines of race revolt and the poison of Bolshevism to the Negroes."

Hoover not only continuously shadowed Marcus Garvey but made African-American newspapers and magazines targets as well. Hoover proposed that all dissent should be targeted for investigation. Latter, during World War II, Hoover watched every black newspaper in the country for subversion. He tapped the phones of black organizations and even investigated Jesse Owens, the hero of the Olympics of 1936.

During the race riots of the 1940's, Hoover was convinced that it was communists who were stirring up all the trouble. In fact, in Hoover's view all those who supported racial justice were to be watched carefully. They were calling for anti-lynching laws and all those who signed petitions supporting that effort became targets of the bureau as well. They were called "Fellow Travelers." Despite this, he never found one piece of evidence that linked black groups with communists. But that, as we know, did not deter him.

I bring this all up because now we are asking librarians to become spies. Every time someone checks out a book, it will be monitored. Do we really want to do this? In the name of war- time security are we willing to keep people locked up without any probable cause? Are we not a nation of laws?

History has shown us that this kind of behavior is always a grave mistake.

Sources: Kenneth Reilly: Racial Matters: The FBI's Secret File on Black Americans.

Sitting Bull and Wounded Knee

By Denis Mueller

In July of 1864, a war party of Hunkpapa Sioux captured a woman named Mrs. Fanny Kelly. For five months she was held prisoner and stayed with Sitting Bull and his family. Mrs. Kelly was treated as a guest and she wrote about this experience. "He was uniformly gentle and kind to his wife and children and courteous and considerate in his actions with others. During my stay with them food was scarce more than once, and both Sitting Bull and his wife suffered to supply me with food. They both have a very warm place in my heart."

Sitting Bull stands as one of the great figures in our history and his death is an American tragedy. His friend Catherine Weldon said of him, "As a friend sincere and true, as a patriot devoted and incorruptible, as a husband and father, affectionate and considerate. As a host, courteous and hospitable to the last degree."

So why, when Sitting Bull was assassinated by the reservation police, did the press so vigorously denounce him? The Minneapolis Tribune said he "should be hung higher than Hamar and with less ceremony than is observed by a Texas lynching party towards a horse thief."

Sitting Bull stood in the way of the white man's progress. So he had to be destroyed because they could never kill his spirit. He had led a peaceful life since surrendering after his victory at Little Big Horn. Now, he had given his sanction to the Ghost Dance, which strove to raise the dead and defeat the white man.

The Ghost Dance started when a Painte shaman named Wovoka woke from what seemed to be scarlet fever and claimed he saw a vision. Wovoka proclaimed himself the Messiah and prophesied that the dead would soon join the living in a world where the white man would be gone and the land would be filled with game. To hasten the dream the Sioux danced and wore bright clothing, which would protect them from the bluecoats. All throughout the reservations the dance spread. The dreadful conditions of these concentration camps longed for any sign of hope.

Now, an Indian agent wired the Department of Interior and asked for the leaders to be arrested. The reservation police captured and then murdered Sitting Bull. When Chief Big Foot heard of Sitting Bull's death he led his people to the Pine Ridge reservation where he thought that he would be protected. This was not to be the case. On the night before the massacre at Wounded Knee, a group of drunken troopers attempted to kid- nap Big Foot. The soldiers spoke of revenge for Little Big Horn.

The next day Colonel Forsyth began to disarm the tribe and then separated the women and children from the men. The soldiers were abusive and when they attempted to confiscate a rifle form a deaf mute, the gun went off. Now the soldiers opened fire. The gatling guns fired bullets at Big Foot's people. The bullets struck both women and children. In fact, women and children were found as far as two miles away.

When it was all over three hundred of Big Foot's people were dead along with about thirty soldiers. The troopers died in many cases as victims of their own crossfire. Thus ended the wars against the native people. At one time there were about 11 million natives living in the United States. By 1900, there was less than a million.

Sources: Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Attack On the USS Liberty

The Middle East is in the news again. Over the years, no country in the world has been a better friend to Israel than the United States. In fact, the US with Harry Truman as President, was the first country to recognize the state of Israel. It took only 6 seconds for that vote to be cast. All of the economic reasons behind this vote is not the subject of this issue (maybe for another day), but there is a little known episode in the relationship between US and Israel that has long been forgotten; The sinking of the USS Liberty.

The time was 1967 and the Arab countries and Israel were locked in a war of words. These words were about to turn into the real thing. Israel had superior technology, having been armed by the United States while the Arab countries (notably Egypt and Syria) were armed by the Soviet Union. At that time, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were under the control of Jordan's King Hussein.

Patrolling the Mediterranean just off the coast, was a US intelligence ship called the USS Liberty. Its mission was to monitor communications from both Israel and Jordan. Egypt, Syria and Israel had mobilized their troops in anticipation of hostilities breaking out. Jordan, always a moderate in both Israel and US eyes, had no appetite for getting into another war with Israel. Jordan knew it could not win.

Hussein told the US that if hostilities broke out he wanted no part of them. Jordan did not want to lose territory, which was all but certain if they fought Israel. Jordan's King Hussein had rebuked Nasser, President of Egypt and told him that Jordan would not fight Israel. Hussein turned to the US and asked if the Americans could promise that Israel would not attack its positions. The US gave these assurances and The USS Liberty's mission was to monitor communications to ensure compliance. It was in position to know if Jordan would attack Israel and visa versa.

What has become known as The Six Day War was about to begin. In the wee hours of the morning, Israel's air force attacked Egypt and disabled nearly the entire Egyptian Air Force while the planes were still on the ground. Within hours, Israel had effectively won the war and turned its attention to Jerusalem, even though Jordan had not entered the war. The USS Liberty picked up communications that Israel had indeed intended to attack Jordan to seize Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Israel knew what the mission was of the USS Liberty and despite the clear United States flag flying proceeded to attack the USS Liberty. Not one pass, but several passes. The deliberate attack was a clear attempt to keep the USS Liberty from notifying Jordan that Israel was about to seize Jerusalem. The attack lasted for over an hour, critically disabling the US vessel. Several Americans were killed. Most people know that Israeli paratroopers seized Jerusalem without much of a fight and present hostilities owe their beginning to those six days.

While this is a forgotten episode in US history, it is also an interesting question to ask why the episode was so under- reported. The Six Day War was a popular triumph in the US press and what ensued was a cover-up to keep Americans in the dark about what their ally had done. The commander of the Liberty, James Ennis, would have none of it and years later penned his account in the book from which this overview was taken. The book's name? Conspiracy of Silence: Attack On The USS Liberty.

Source: Conspiracy Of Silence: Attack On The USS Liberty by James Ennis

The Fall of Martin Dies

By Denis Mueller

Sometimes there are victories in history. Once in a while the worst of the worst are defeated. Such was the case of Martin Dies the first chairman of the House on Un-American Activates Committee (HUAC). HUAC was never challenged by the mainstream press so Dies was able bully all those he opposed by brandish- ing them as communist.

His favorite targets were unions, artists and the New Deal. When Dies said that there were 1,121 federal employees who were subversives no one in the press challenged his statement. Even when, after a long investigation by the Attorney General, it was found out that only three people had questionable views, the press still refused to report it. One alternative news source that did was In Fact, a journal published by George Seldes.

President Roosevelt called him a liar and Republican Party candidate Wendell Wilke said that Dies had undermined the democratic process. In Germany Hitler’s radio service endorsed him and the German Bund and the Ku Klux Klan ravenously praised Dies. The press of Texas still endorsed Dies.

Dies hated labor and was a pawn of Texas Oil companies, they were evil back then as well, and Dies red baited the CIO consciously. Finally, the Texas Oil Workers Union had enough. Turning to In Fact for documentation on Tide Water, Gulf and others and their use of machine guns, thugs and spying, which was all in the congressional record, but ignored by the oil lackeys who ran the press of Texas.

When all this came to light and Dies again made his charges the papers of Port Arthur, Texas. They were forced to print the news. When the Maritime Union admitted one thousand blacks to its membership blood filled the streets. But the people prevailed despite the support of the both the national and local press. When Dies was defeated for re-election his story was dropped like a hot coal.

When Dies tried to run again two years later, the oil workers, armed with the facts from the magazine In Fact, forced Dies not to run. He had no support in the district. Angered, he blamed the CIO, saying "It will come obvious to the people that the CIO will become the Communist Party of America." Well, it never did and those oil workers were far better Americans than Dies ever was.

Dies was the un-American, as are all those who point fingers at the innocent. We are a country of laws, for which we should be proud. All those who say either "you’re with me or against me" don’t understand our past. So when you hear complaints about one group or another, most likely the person doing the talking is a hypocrite. In this era of heightened tensions we must understand, myself included, that what makes us strong is our tolerance.

Sources: George Seldes: Tell the Truth and Run

The Night They Came To Kill Chinamen

Five white men and two Indians in Squak, Washington Territory, responded violently to the hiring of cheap Chinese laborers to pick hops in 1885. By Brad Asher for Wild West Magazine

Gong Heng San had not slept for two days. Neither had the 36 other Chinese laborers hired by L. A. and Ingelbricht Wold to pick the hops on their farm just outside a little town called Squak in King County, Washington Territory. The sleeplessness of Gong Heng San and friends was understandable; it's difficult to rest comfortably with the threat of mob violence looming over you.

The Saturday night of the workers' arrival, a crowd of armed men had confronted the Wolds and told them to expel the Chinese from their farm. "I shall either die or the Chinamen shall go," Henry Tibbetts, one of the members of the crowd, had angrily told L. A. Wold. The next night, the workers' sleep was disturbed by reports that a second group of Chinese laborers on their way to join their countrymen at the Wolds' farm had been turned back at gunpoint by an angry mob.

The Wolds notified the district attorney's office in Seattle of impending violence. J. T. Ronald, the D.A., wired George Tibbetts, a Squak merchant and the local justice of the peace, for his assessment of the situation. "I don't think their [sic] will be any trouble in our little valley," Tibbetts wrote back. "Their [sic] was a little disturbance at the China Camp I am told, but as near as I can find out about it-it was just for a little fun." Law and order would be maintained, Tibbetts said.

The Wolds passed on these promises to their workers. Relieved and reassured, the weary men turned in early on the night of Monday, September 7, 1885.

At about 9:30 that evening, a group of 10 to 12 men opened fire on the Chinese camp. "It sounded like a China New Years," Gong Heng San said later. "So many firecrackers." The Chinese fled in panic, while the mob unsuccessfully tried to burn their tents.

When Gong Heng San and a handful of the workers returned about 15 minutes later, they found their compatriot Fung Wue dead from a gunshot to the chest. A gut-shot Mong Gow lived an agonizing half hour before he too died. Yeng San, wounded in the let arm and in both legs, lingered painfully through the evening. "I'll die sure," Yeng San told Gong Heng San. "I am sorry. Got a son home. Too young. No one to send him money." Come morning, Yeng San was also dead. The rest of the workers elected to return to the relative safety of Seattle.

Gong Heng San called it "the night white men came to kill Chinamen," but the mob included more than white men. In a rare instance of Indian-white cooperation, several local Indians joined the attack on the Chinese. Their reason? They resented the competition from Chinese labor. Hop growers in Washington Territory had typically hired Indians to pick their crop, and now Indians and whites found common ground in their fear that low-wage Chinese labor would take away their jobs.

Only about 105,000 Chinese resided in the united States at the time of the shootings, but their presence aroused a great deal of prejudice, particularly in the West, where their numbers were highest. About three-fourths of the total Chinese population lived in California, with most of the rest scattered through Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and Washington Territory. In Washington, the Chinese numbered just shy of 3,200 out of a total population of 67,199.

Since their first arrival on western shores in the 1860s, the Chinese had been greeted with violence by the resident Americans. In 1871, massive anti-Chinese riots convulsed Los Angeles and San Francisco, and during the Great Railway Strike of 1877, mobs burned 25 Chinese businesses in San Francisco. Denver saw a wave of anti-Chinese disturbances in 1880. And in 1885, just five days before the Squak incident, white miners rioted against the presence of Chinese laborers in Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory.

The violence at Squak differed from these other incidents because of the Indians' participation. By 1885, the Indians of western Washington Territory no longer depended solely on hunting, fishing and gathering for their food. Nor did they receive government rations the way some reservation-bound tribes in other parts of the country did. Many of them lived off the reservations and worked for wages, a necessity because white settlers had disrupted their traditional ways of getting food. Indians worked in lumber camps, sawmills and mines, as well as in the settlers' houses and fields.

The boom in hops growing, which took hold in the 1880s, gave Indians another potential source of cash income. In fact, by 1885, the hops harvests had become grand get-togethers for Indians all over the Northwest-a time not just for work but also for socializing. Three days after the shootings at Squak, for example, one observer found 1,000 Indian pickers-including "British Columbia Indians, Flatheads and a large camp of Klickitats from east of the [Cascade] mountains"-encamped at a hop ranch in Snoqualmie, north of Seattle.

The extremely low market price for hops in 1885, however, had goaded the Wold brothers into replacing their Indian pickers with Chinese. The Indians had been promised $1 per box, according to one newspaper account, but the Wolds wanted to get their crop in more cheaply. "It was…generally understood," the report stated, "that the Indians…would refuse to accept the reduction." The Wolds had therefore contacted a Chinese labor contractor in Seattle to provide them with a replacement work force.

One Seattle newspaper described the shootings as the "War of the Wages."

Word of the shootings spread quickly among the locals, who had little liking for the Chinese. A jury of inquiry was hastily impaneled by none other than George Tibbetts, the local justice of the peace, who had pooh-poohed the possibility of violence. This jury rapidly issued its official verdict: the Chinese men had died at the hands of "persons unknown."

Tibbetts' effort to sweep the case under the rug failed when an 18-year-old laborer named Sam Robertson admitted to Ronald, the King County district attorney, that he and several other men had taken part in the shootings. On October 7, with the help of Robertson's testimony, Ronald got a grand jury to indict seven men, including two Indians, for murder.

Robertson said that about 7:30 the night of the killings, Tibbetts had stepped out of his store and fired eight shots into the air. This signal prompted the gathering of seven men, including Robertson and Perry Bayne, a local blacksmith whom Robertson named as the ringleader of the group. Each of the men carried a weapon, and Tibbetts furnished them with ammunition.

At about 8:30, the men left Tibbetts' store and proceeded to the neighboring Indian camp. As Robertson was the only one who spoke and understood Chinook jargon, the pidgin trade language that allowed whites and Indians to communicate, he was appointed to recruit the Indians. Robertson, Bayne, and Daniel Hues visited the tents of three Indians: Jim Graham, Indian Curley and Indian Johnny. The Indians were reluctant to join in, but a combination of threats and persuasion finally convinced them to take part. According to Jim Graham, the whites had told the Indians that if they did not come along on the attack, the white men would shoot them.

The group, now grown to 10, continued on their way. A number of curious onlookers, both white and Indian, joined them, swelling the crown to about 20 people. Robertson led the way, as he was the most familiar with the area. "After going half a mile," Robertson later testified, "we stopped and agreed to stay together. If any man ran away and left the others, he was to be shot." Several men left the group at this point.

The Chinese encampment on the Wolds' farm sat on a little peninsula formed by a creek that ran on the property. The group of armed men approached it from the south. They crossed through a gap in the fence and closed in on the first tent. "Hold up the tent and all shoot when we get ready," commanded Bayne.

As the group surrounded the tent, Robertson saw a flash from a rifle some 60 to 75 yards in front of them. At the same instant, Bayne gave the order to fire, and the group riddled the tent with bullets. When the firing stopped, one member of the group turned to Bayne. "What do we do now, Perry?" he asked.

"Dry up your damned mouth," Bayne responded. "Don't call my name. Everybody knows me here."

Robertson testified that his gun jammed after the first round. When he told Bayne his gun was broken, Bayne snapped, "Never mind the gun; start pulling down the tents." After a halfhearted effort to burn the tents (everything was wet because of the autumn rains typical of Washington), the men hurried from the camp and quickly walked home, swearing not to talk to anyone about the evening's events.

What role did the Indians play in all of this? Jim Graham said the Indians fled when the shooting started. Sam Robertson and Perry Bayne also seemed to exonerate the Indians from any part I the actual shooting. Bayne said that the "white men would have been afraid to trust the Indians." The whites may have gotten the Indians involved because they wanted scapegoats in case something went wrong. Graham initially refused to testify in the case because he was afraid it was a way for the whites to "lay the blame on the Indians for killing the Chinamen."

Once it became clear that white men had done the shooting, public opinion in the territory made clear its support of the attackers' ends, if not their means. The Seattle Daily Post-Intelligencer editorialized that a fair trial and just punishments were needed "if respect for the law is to be maintained among our people, and if the fair reputation of Washington Territory…is to be preserved." But the newspaper also went on to say: "The people of King County may be said to be unanimous in their recognition of the evils entailed by the employment of Chinese contract labor. They approve of any honest, fair, and manly movement designed to relieve American laborers of Chinese competition."

The judge in the case, Roger Greene, made the same distinction between means and ends. Born in Boston in 1840, Greene had come west in 1870 to serve as a district judge. He had logged an extraordinary 15 years on the territorial bench, the longest of any territorial district judge. An ordained Baptist minister, a dedicated Republican and a social reformer, Greene was probably the pre-eminent jurist in Washington Territory.

In a case ostensibly about murder, however, Greene went out of his way to make clear his own sentiments about the Chinese. In an address to the grand jury, Greene stated that he shared the "prevalent conviction of the people" that the Chinese "are out of place in America and…their presence is an obstacle to its highest business prosperity."

But Greene stressed the difference between the desire to be rid of the Chinese and the recourse to violence to achieve that goal. No matter how the jurors felt about the Chinese, he told them, "a resort to lawless violence to promote their removal is utterly inexcusable." That prosperity so threatened by Chinese labor, Greene said, "will be scattered to the four winds if this county is to be published to the world as the place to which social agitators can safely resort to try their experiment of mob law."

Two days after the grand jury indicted the suspects, Greene rewarded Sam Robertson for his testimony before the grand jury. He discharged Robertson and barred any further trial of him because of his cooperation as a witness. Robertson had betrayed his friends so that he could go free.

The trial started on October 28. Robertson was the star witness, but the prosecution also called two Indians and two Chinese to the witness stand. The defense immediately objected to the testimony of Gong Heng San. How could a non-Christian "Chinaman" understand an oath to tell the truth, much less the significance of placing his hand upon a Bible?

Gong Heng San said that he knew the "sanctity and binding force of an oath," and that he "believed in the God he had been taught about in the schools he had attended in America." He said he had never seen a Chinese person swear on the bloody head of a chicken or by the burning of paper, and he swore he did not worship "the idols or gods of china."

"He seems to be a convert," the defense attorney admitted, and withdrew his objection to Gong Heng San's testimony.

The first witnesses merely set the stage for Robertson, who had been laid low by typhoid fever for three weeks prior to the trial. He came to the witness stand attended by his doctor, and again testified that Bayne and the other defendants were at the Chinese encampment with guns blazing on Monday night.

The defense attacked him as a liar, calling witnesses who contradicted portions of Robertson's story, especially regarding who was present at Tibbetts' store immediately before the shooting and how many guns were available. The day after Robertson left the witness stand, the man who had shared his jail cell told one of the defense attorneys that Robertson had admitted he lied. While in jail, Robertson had told his cell mates that George Tibbetts had not furnished any ammunition that night, but that he was going to stick to the story to get himself "out of the fix in which he was, and then get out of the country."

"Robertson is here working for the territory in order to save his won neck," the defense told the jury. The defense also called Robertson a hothead and the real ringleader of the attack. Two defense witnesses testified to Robertson's own vehement anti-Chinese feeling. The night before the shootings, one witness recalled, Robertson had launched into a tirade against the Chinese, branding the white men in the valley a bunch of cowards. "If I could get a few men to follow me I would go up and kill every one of them," Robertson reportedly said. Robertson, the defense concluded, was an "impetuous young fellow who had read a great many novels of blood curdling incidents, who wanted to be a leader and do some daring deeds."

Meanwhile, a parade of character witnesses testified to the good reputation of Bayne and the other defendants. No one, it seemed, had ever seen Bayne commit a violent act or say one word against the Chinese. The defense said that rather than being the ringleader of the attack, as the prosecution maintained, Robertson had only gone along with the crowd to try to dissuade the other men from violence.

The defense also made much of Robertson's statement that the first flash of gunfire had come from the direction of the Chinese camp. Rather than an unprovoked attack, the whites had simply returned fire in self-defense, the attorneys argued. The last weapon in the defense's arsenal was to shift the blame away from the men who had attacked the Chinese and toward the true culprits-the Wolds.

The Wolds had triggered the conflict, the argument went, by bringing in the Chinese workers. The settlers around Squak depended on the hop industry for their livelihood. They did not object to Indian labor because the wages were spent in the community. But by bringing in the Chinese, the Wolds had tried to "introduce a class of labor that on account of its cheapness was objectionable to a greater class of the citizens of the valley."

Moreover, the Wolds had intended hop picking to be only an "entering wedge" for the Chinese. With a lot of land to be cleared, the Wolds clearly intended to wreck the whole local economy by replacing white (and Indian) labor wholesale with cheap "coolie" labor.

Who was telling the truth? After four days of testimony before a packed courthouse, it was up to the jury to decide. Judge Greene told the jurors that even if they were not sure who had fired any of the fatal shots, the defendants were legally guilty if they had aided and abetted in the killings. He also reminded them that "a Chinaman, upon our soil,…stands before the law, just as any other man would, with the same rights to life and limb and property…as any one of our own citizens."

The jury did not deliberate long. They returned with their verdict the very same day. Not guilty. The anti-Chinese feelings of the jurors, combined with the uncertainty over exactly who had fired the fatal shots and the defense's planting of the idea that the shootings might have been in self-defense, had derailed the prosecution's case.

But District Attorney Ronald had one more trick up his sleeve. If not guilty of murder, perhaps the defendants could be found guilty of riot, meaning a violent disturbance of the peace. Ronald tried the same seven men, plus George Tibbetts, on this new charge, which included not only the shootings on Monday night but also the confrontation at the Wolds' farm on Saturday night.

Since most of the defendants had already confessed to participating in the Saturday night incident, the prosecutor's job was easier. On November 23, the jury returned a guilty verdict. A week later, the penalty was imposed: a $500 fine. The lives of three Chinese men, apparently, came quite cheap.

Not cheap enough, however. The defendants appealed their conviction to the Territorial Supreme Court. Their appeal rested on the fact that women had been included on the grand jury that had handed down the indictments. The women were not qualified grand jurors, the appeal charged, so the indictments were invalid.

The appeal came before the Supreme court in January 1888. The court had just invalidated a law giving women the vote, saying it violated the territorial Organic Act, the founding law of Washington Territory. Now, the court reasoned, if women were not entitled to vote, how could they be entitled to sit on grand juries, especially since the law required all grand jurors to be heads of household and qualified voters? They could not, the court decided, and so every indictment handed down by a grand jury with a female member was invalid.

The case against the rioters was returned to the lower court for retrial. But a retrial never occurred. After the passage of so many years and with the disappointing results from the earlier trials, the prosecutor doubtless thought the chances for a conviction were slim. And so the matter ended, at least in the eyes of the law.

But the incident at Squak only foreshadowed larger anti-Chinese demonstrations in the months to come. Mass meetings against Chinese labor were held in the cities of Seattle and Tacoma during the trial of the Squak defendants.

The day after the acquittal of the defendants, a movement led largely by labor organizations expelled the Chinese population of Tacoma beyond the city limits. Most of the Chinese population of Seatttle was also kicked out of the city, despite the arrival of federal troops to maintain order and protect the Chinese.

Indians continued to pick the hops and perform other forms of manual labor for Washington's farmers until well into the 20th century. Only when a blight destroyed large parts of the local hops industry in the 1920s did hops picking cease to be an important source of Indian employment.

As for the individual defendants in the Squak cases, no one can know for sure if the men fingered by Sam Robertson were the actual guilty parties. Although they were no friends to the Chinese, they were not necessarily murderers. But whoever killed those three Chinese men at Squak, they got away with it. As happened so often in the West, the long arm of the law did not reach very far.