igratory workers,
strikers, and citizens generally, dropped in from time to time to ask
about the organization or to purchase papers. Solidarity and the
Industrial Worker were particularly in demand, the latter paper having
commenced publication in Seattle on April 1st, 1916. A number of Everett
citizens, desiring to hear a lecture by James P. Thompson, who had
spoken in Everett without molestation in 1915 and in March and April of
1916, made donations to Remick sufficient to cover all expenses, and it
was arranged that Thompson speak on August 22nd. Attempts to secure a
hall met with failure; the halls of Everett were closed to the I. W. W.
The conspiracy against free speech and free assembly was on in earnest!
No other course was left but to hold the proposed meeting on the street,
so Hewitt and Wetmore, the spot where the Salvation Army and various
religious and political bodies spoke almost nightly, was selected and
the meeting advertised.

Early in the morning on the day before the scheduled meeting, Sheriff
McRae, commanding a body of police officers over whom he had no official
control, stormed into the I. W. W. hall and tore from the wall all bills
advertising Thompson's meeting, saying with an oath:

"That man won't be allowed to speak in Everett!"

Turning to Remick and throwing back his coat to display the badge, he
yelled:

"I order you out of this town! Get out by afternoon or you go to jail!"

McRae was drunk. Stalking out as rapidly as his condition would permit
he staggered down the street to a near-by pool hall where the order was
repeated to the men assembled therein. These, with other workingmen, 25
in all were rounded up, seized, roughly questioned, searched, and all
those who had no families or property in Everett were forcibly deported.
That night ten more were taken from the shingle weaver's picket line and
sent out of town without due process of law. Treatment of this kind
became general.

"Not a man in overalls is safe!" declared the secretary of the Everett
Building Trades Council. "Men just off the job with their pay checks in
their pocket have been unceremoniously thrown out of town just because
they were workingmen."[6]

Remick closed the little hall and left for Seattle the next morning to
place the question of the Thompson meeting before the Seattle
membership. Shortly before noon Rowan, who had just returned to Everett,
went to the hall and finding it closed and locked he proceede