La Conner pioneer reached labor's pinnacle

Another day, another dollar.

More than a familiar lament, it was truly a way of life for one of La Conner’s more famous – or infamous, depending on your political leanings – native sons.

Hulet M. Wells, born in 1878 on a farm near town, toiled in hayfields as a young man for a buck a day.

He also worked variously as a railway section hand, postal worker, street paver, logger, miner and shingle weaver.

And that’s just to name a few.

But his eventual calling was that of a labor activist, a role that led Wells in 1912 to run for mayor of Seattle. His name appeared on the ballot in that crossroads election beneath Socialist Party standard bearer Eugene V. Debs, who made four bids for the White House.

The 1912 presidential race also featured the political comeback of Theodore Roosevelt, running on the Progressive, or Bull Moose, ticket. Roosevelt’s campaign would siphon votes from Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and hand the election to Woodrow Wilson.

That would have dire consequences for Wells.

When Wilson committed the U.S. to World War I, both Wells and Debs were jailed for their opposition to American entry into the conflict.

Wilson’s stance was effectively spelled out by George Kreel, who during the war chaired the U.S. Committee on Public Information, a public relations – some might term it propaganda – arm of the government.

Facing a prison term to be split between McNeil Island and Leavenworth, Wells responded with his trademark wit and wry humor in “Wilson and the Issues of Today,” a tract he penned in 1918.

“George (Kreel) received a good political job for writing the First Volume (“Wilson and the Issues”),” Wells noted, “and I have already had a federal position tendered me, where I will be able to serve my country and I may soon don the uniform – which is furnished free to all inmates.”

By that point in his life, having just turned 40, Wells had already established himself as a leading voice for labor in the Pacific Northwest. He studied law at the University of Washington then drew national attention when he tried to unionize fellow Seattle postal workers.

U.S. Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock fired Wells for his efforts.

Wells earned the enmity of powerful Seattle Times publisher Alden Blethen, especially after a 1911 May Day parade became particularly rowdy.

Arguably the public face of socialism in Seattle prior to his imprisonment, Wells drifted even further left following his release, embracing tenets of communism. He rebuked those who derided the radical International Workers of the World when they lampooned I.W.W. as standing for “I Won’t Work.”

Wells, who had held a host of jobs over the course of his life, pointedly chose “I Wanted to Work” as the title for his autobiography.

Wells had grown up working and working hard, at that. His parents, Hiram and Alfreda Wells, from eastern Canada, built a cabin and homesteaded outside La Conner, growing oats and barley, plus hay for silage.

Young Wells floated between family concerns in British Columbia and La Conner before joining the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska.

He is said to have lingered in the Yukon trying to pay off gambling debts. But his biggest gamble likely was enlisting in labor activism when it was hardly fashionable and sometimes dangerous.

Wells would rise to preside over the Seattle Central Labor Council, a wing of the Samuel Gompers-led American Federation of Labor.

In the 1920s and 1930s Wells continued to lecture on behalf of labor, ultimately founding the Unemployed Citizens League of Seattle.

Rarely at a loss for words, Wells was the acknowledged spokesman for Washington state’s free speech movement in the early 20th century.

He was silenced only by death, in 1970, at age 91.