Overview

Hundreds of IWW union men sail into a harbor bristling with armed deputies. Before the day is over, blood will stain the waters of Port Gardner Bay. Men on both sides will be dead. And American labor history will be changed forever. The Everett Massacre is one of the most pivotal and most deliberately forgotten moments in American working class history. Lives lost on both sides of a confrontation that exposed the raw and violent collision between corporate power and the desperate human need for dignity, fair wages, and the right to organize. A moment that shaped the American labor movement and then was quietly buried beneath a century of collective forgetting. Survival in a Mill Town brings this buried chapter of American history to life with the precision of a journalist and the passion of a man who was born and raised in the very streets where it happened. Von Braschler spent years with the documented history of the Everett Massacre before writing a single word of this novel, and every page reflects that depth of research and the kind of intimate personal connection to a place that cannot be manufactured. For readers of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America and The Jungle, this is the Pacific Northwest story that has been waiting to be told. A story about ordinary working people who refused to be crushed by a system designed to destroy them. A story about courage, solidarity, and the real human price paid for the rights that workers still depend on today without knowing where they came from. The 1916 Everett Massacre shaped the American labor movement. It shaped the Pacific Northwest. It shaped the rights every working person in this country carries forward. It is time America remembered it.

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9781684923267

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Von Braschler was born and raised in Everett, Washington, the exact town where the 1916 Everett Massacre unfolded on the waterfront docks that shaped his childhood. That personal and geographic connection to one of the most significant and most overlooked moments in American labor history is the foundation on which Survival in a Mill Town was built.Before becoming an author Von spent years as an award winning journalist, including publishing a lifestyle magazine in Everett itself. That journalism background, the discipline of documented research, the instinct for the human story inside the historical record, is what separates this novel from a simple dramatization. Every character, every confrontation, every moment of courage and violence in this book is rooted in years of careful and dedicated research into what actually happened on that dock in November 1916 and why it carries urgent relevance to working people today.Von holds a degree from the University of Washington in Seattle and has worked across the publishing industry in publicity, marketing, and acquisitions at several specialty publishing houses. He has lived and worked across the United States including Alaska, Oregon, Wyoming, Illinois, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Washington. He is a former faculty member of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York, a former organizer of the Willamette Writers annual writing contest across five western states, and a national gold medal winner for visionary publications.Von frequently appears as a guest on national and international broadcasts and has hosted popular podcasts covering a wide range of topics. He currently lives with his cats on a small rustic island off the coast of Washington state, not far from the town where this story began.

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