The Battle of Seattle. posted by Richard Seymour

The city now stopped functioning, except for activities organised by the strikers to provide essential needs. Firemen agreed to stay on the job. Laundry workers handled only hospital laundry. Vehicles authorised to move carried signs "Exempted by the General Strike Committee". Thirty-five neighbourhood milk stations were set up. Every day, thirty thousand meals were prepared in large kitchens, then transported to halls all over the city and served cafeteria style, with strikers paying twenty-five cents a meal, the general public thirty-five cents. People were allowed to eat as much as they wanted of the beef stew, spaghetti, bread, and coffee.
A Labor War Veteran's Guard was organised to keep the peace. On the blackboard at one of its headquarters was written: "The purpose of this organisation is to preserve law and order without the use of force. No volunteer will have any police power or be allowed to carry weapons of any sort, but to use persuasion only." During the strike, crime in the city decreased. The commander of the US army detachment sent into the area told the strikers' committee that in forty years of military experience he hadn't seen so quiet and orderly a city. A poem printed in the Seattle Union Record (a daily newspaper put out by labor people) by someone called Anise:

What scares them most is
That NOTHING HAPPENS!
They are ready
For DISTURBANCES.
They have machine guns
And soldiers,
But this SMILING SILENCE
Is uncanny.
The business men
Don't understand
That sort of weapon...
It is your SMILE
That is UPSETTING
Their reliance
On Artillery, brother!
It is the garbage wagons
That go along the street
Marked "EXEMPT BY STRIKE COMMITTEE."
It is the milk stations
That are getting better daily,
And three hundred
WAR Veterans of Labour
Handling the crowds
WITHOUT GUNS,
For these things speak
Of a NEW POWER
And a NEW WORLD
That they do not feel
At HOME in.

...

A statement by the mayor of Seattle suggests that the establishment feared not just the strike itself but what it symbolised. He said:

The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact. .... The intent, openly and covertly announced, was for the overthrow of the industrial system; here first, then everywhere. ... True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. [Oh yes it does - lenin]. The general strike, as practised in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet. To succeed, it must suspend everything; stop the entire life stream of a community ... That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt - no matter how achieved.

(Howard Zinn, A People's History of America: From 1492 to the Present, 1996, pp 368-71)