I work two blocks from Free Speech Corner, a site of radical organizing and speech-making since the Seattle General Strike of 1919. Since the Iraq War Protests of 2003, Seattle Democrats have worked to transform public organizing spaces into tourist spots. Occidental Park and Westlake Park used to have large open spaces for crowds to gather and listen to speakers. Today, those same spaces are filled with empty playgrounds that few kids use and food trucks.
"During the first decades of the 1900s, the corner of Occidental and Washington was ground central for radicalism in Seattle. The so-called Free Speech Corner attracted radicals, workers rights organizations, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party, and others. No speaker was more popular than Kate Sadler. Born in Scotland, she arrived in Seattle around 1909 and quickly became “Seattle’s best-beloved radical orator,” wrote labor journalist Harvey O’Connor, in his memoir. She was well-organized, outspoken, fiery, and tough, once stopping a thief by stabbing him with her hatpin. And, in a time when some in the worker’s rights movements were racist xenophobes, Sadler was strongly anti-exclusion. Her strongest language and passion though was for workers. According to a young socialist of the time, wrote O’Connor, “When workers called for help, in strikes, jailings, free speech struggles, Kate came. Kate, the fearless one, the Joan of Arc.”
Over the years, she was arrested many times, once during a speech in Seattle about World War I when she supposedly called President Woodrow Wilson a traitor. But the police had no luck in taking her in because the crowd chased down them down and freed Sadler. In the final years of her life she lived with her husband at the anarchist Utopian community of Home, near Tacoma. She died in 1939."
