Andrew Hedden

Andrew Hedden is the Associate Director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and a graduate student in the UW Department of History’s PhD program.

Overall, I seek to complicate what it means to cast Seattle as an urban exception: a ‘middle class’ city with a high quality of life that has seemingly escaped the urban crises and conservative political turns prevalent elsewhere in the United States. If cities are to provide the political base of resistance to the next four years of the Trump administration, as many have called for, I think what’s needed is a long hard look at the historical strengths and limitations of liberalism and cities in the United States. Seattle, present home to the tech-based New Economy and died-in-the-wool Democrats, is as good as any a place to start.”

Andrew’s Commentary:

“My research explores alternative histories of Seattle that center the experiences of people on the margins of power, documenting the activities and organizations of working-class people and communities of color. I am particularly concerned with the growth of the city’s service economy and political liberalism since the 1970s, and I emphasize the dominant role of the federal government and U.S. empire in economic development, as well as the roles of race and gender.

Overall, I seek to complicate what it means to cast Seattle as an urban exception: a ‘middle class’ city with a high quality of life that has seemingly escaped the urban crises and conservative political turns prevalent elsewhere in the United States. If cities are to provide the political base of resistance to the next four years of the Trump administration, as many have called for, I think what’s needed is a long hard look at the historical strengths and limitations of liberalism and cities in the United States. Seattle, present home to the tech-based New Economy and died-in-the-wool Democrats, is as good as any a place to start.”

“U.S. empire built Seattle as we know it today, most notably through the millions of dollars in Cold War military contracts granted the Boeing Company throughout the 20th century. But long before Boeing was a household name, the international reach of U.S. commercial and military power contributed to the economic development of Seattle through the trade benefits and labor flows created by the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. Part of my research has explored this history through the life of Carlos Bulosan, a famed Filipino novelist, poet, and labor and anti-colonialism activist, who first came to the city in 1930, returning many times again over the course of his life, before dying here in 1952. The UW Labor Archives collections of Bulosan’s writings and correspondence provide an indispensable window into the Seattle world of Bulosan, revealing a city full of colonial inequalities, racial violence, and labor exploitation, but also radical working-class resistance.

The rise of the Boeing Company defined Seattle after World War II, but often lost in the traditional story is the place of Boeing workers themselves. Another part of my research into Seattle’s history, therefore, has explored the role of Boeing’s machinists, unionized since 1936 in the International Association of Machinists, District Lodge 751. This history is documented in a number of collections in the Labor Archives in UW Special Collections, including local union records and the papers of union activists. The union has gone unheralded in traditional Seattle history, yet its efforts have saved Seattle on at least one occasion. When the Boeing Company nearly went bankrupt in the early 1970s, driving double-digit unemployment in the Seattle area, it was the union-generated protections of high wages, seniority, and unemployment insurance that kept the city’s economy from fully imploding.”