The Seattle Labor Temple in Belltown was once a shelter for many of the city’s “radical” participants. Former Congressman Hugh DeLacey, known as a political “lefty,” attended parties and meetings in that building. In his day DeLacey raised money, support, and hell for the Puget Sound working man. Former Teamster chief Dave Beck, while not in the traditional radical club, was another passionate member of Organized Labor who frequented the Labor Temple.
Directly across the street from the Labor Temple is the George F. Vanderveer Building. Its quiet white modern facade seems to obscure the colorful, high-temperature career of its namesake.
George Vanderveer arrived in Seattle in 1901 with the bindlestiffs, unshaven wanderers, and lingering sourdoughs left over from Yukon Gold Rush days. A few of the uneducated hard-knocks boys rose to success, but Vanderveer was different. He toted, along with an old suitcase, degrees from Stanford and Columbia.
Judge Thomas Burke, representing money and railroad interests, nonetheless fearlessly opposed an unruly mob bent on throwing the Chinese out of Seattle. Vanderveer and Burke liked each other, and their courtroom presence was both dramatic and forceful before the bar. Burke as a venerable judge steered the bright young attorney into several legal forays.
After railroad and lumber booms in Seattle were underway, agitation grew for the rights of labor. The Industrial Workers of the World (“Wobblies”) came out of Chicago in the early 1900s and recruited among the fertile Pacific Northwest working population.
As a Deputy King County Prosecuting Attorney, George Vanderveer stepped into one courtroom fracas after another. Most of his cases emanated from the streets of Skid Road. His legal life was a baptism in the world of radicals, pickpockets, and their neighbors.
Employing sarcasm and reprimand, Vanderveer would lean into the face of a witness and whisper. Suddenly, eyes burning, he would raise his voice and shock the room with bombast. Maybe it was theater, but his general style won cases and helped establish a local legend. In later years, he would be compared with Clarence Darrow.
In a man’s world, Vanderveer also held his own. He knew how to take a drink and fight bare-knuckle style on city streets. Women found him singularly attractive. He seemed to thrive in twin worlds: one was the logical, researched precedent required by the processes of law — helped by his education and brilliance. The other was an inherited gut feeling that those who worked with their hands, wage-earners, deserved a fair measure of our nation’s economic and political power.
Defending Wobblies and vagrants against entrenched interests became Vanderveer’s life. He was invited to Chicago to advise in the trial of Big Bill Haywood, known as Mr. I.W.W., who, with several others, was being tried under the World War I Espionage Act. Wobblies were then targeted as saboteurs and draft resisters. The country was in an economic and chauvinistic uproar. The rights of individuals frequently took a back seat to what authorities termed “greater community interests.”
After unions became an accepted feature of American economic life, and the din of Skid Road strife died with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, George Vanderveer’s law practice emphasized personal-injury cases. His income rose as the economic and political excitement abated.
Divorce, remarriage, the suicide of his second wife, and dubious financial investments marked his late years. In the 1930s George Vanderveer represented both the Teamsters and Dave Beck personally.
He died in 1942 after a lung operation. A Justice of the Washington State Supreme Court, surrounded by professional, labor, and business leaders, delivered funeral orations. Both political radicals and traditional interests had lost a friend.
