What was socialism like during the Seattle General Strike?

a post by Scotty Hendricks for the Big Think blog

The story of that one time a U.S. city was run by a Soviet, and what it was like to live in it.

• In 1919, the city of Seattle was shut down by a strike. Most business that took place was union approved.
• The story shows how a city can be run by workers even in the United States.
• It also shows that big ideas can benefit from well thought out plans.

The world was pretty unstable one hundred years ago. The Spanish flu was decimating global populations already ravaged by the first world war, revolutions had broken out across the world, and many people were unable to reconcile their wartime experiences with their pre-war values. For many people living at the time, it would have seemed like the world, already beaten down by the most destructive war in human history, was coming apart at the seams.

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