Starla Sampaco speaks to Crosscut Associate Opinion Editor Mason Bryan and Crosscut Editor-at-Large Knute Berger about the complexities of red and blue inclinations in Washington and journalism’s role in reconciling the political divide in the state.
Varisha Khan is a first-time city council member in Redmond. She drafted, proposed and passed recent legislation that protects Redmond residents from late fees and evictions, and offers support during other hardships. She recognizes this pandemic as a collective trauma for society and the only way she feels she can cope is by doing what she knows: helping her community through writing humane policy that mends a frayed social safety net.
Before Seattle elected its second female mayor, Jenny Durkan. there was “Bertha’s Legacy.” Take a historical look back at the first woman to hold the office and her struggle to reform a corrupt police department.
Washington has a dark history. In 1936, the Evergreen State became the only state in the union to allow a vocal fascist presidential candidate on the ballot. The Silver Shirts, a fascist splinter group that fielded a presidential candidate William Dudley Pelley.
In 1872, Seattle council passed Ordinance 32 that outlined punishment for vagrants — the idle, dissolute, immoral, profligate, or the unemployed — by specifying that they could be put to work. Many offenses earned a sentence on the chain gang: Swearing, drunkenness, illegal gambling, patronizing prostitutes. But for many, the only offense was being poor.
A century ago, violence of a brutal nature broke out in southwest Washington when two ideologies clashed: the anti-Bolshevik American Legion and the radical organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW—better known as the Wobblies. The violence left its scars on the streets of Centralia in Lewis County in November 1919, and the legacy of that date is still debated.