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100 years ago in Spokane: A judge ordered striking railroad workers to cease picketing

One of the largest strikes in Spokane’s history was growing more contentious.
A federal judge ordered the Great Northern railway strikers to cease picketing – a move the Spokane Daily Chronicle described as “a bolt from the sky.”
The order affected about 900 strikers at the Great Northern shops in Hillyard. The judge said picketers were intimidating nonunion workers and “interfering with intrastate and interstate traffic.”
The order did not affect hundreds of other Spokane workers who had walked out of Spokane’s three other railway shops. Yet management in those shops were contemplating seeking similar orders.
The union strike committee declined to comment on the order, but this was clearly a serious blow.
No one knew exactly how the strikers would respond.
The U.S. marshal in Spokane said he was confident that the strikers would obey the injunction. He also pledged to “swear in an adequate force of deputies” to carry out the order if necessary.
From the war and peace beat: The national commander of the American Legion said that more than a million veterans in his organization had started an international movement “for permanent peace.”
“Our war was a war to end all wars,” the Legion commander told a meeting of editors in Missoula. “We believe in adequate defense for our country. But our eyes were opened through hard experience. We know what war means and to the best of our ability through all the coming years, we intend to see that such things do not happen again.”
He said the American veterans were joined by veterans from Britain, France, Canada, South Africa, Italy and Yugoslavia. Significantly, German veterans were not mentioned.