Seattle

On Friday May 16, tenants at twelve apartments behind the Green Lake Motel on Aurora Ave got a surprise visit from their landlords - who also own the motel and a few others - saying they had two days to move out, or they'd be arrested. The motel's license was being suspended due to unsafe conditions, and the apartments had been operating (possibly wrongly) under the same license.

The First World War was hardly over, it was February 1919, and the leadership of the revolutionary rank-and-file union the Industrial Workers of the World was in jail. However, the IWW idea of the general strike became reality for five days in Seattle, Washington, when a walkout of 100,000 working people brought the city to a halt.