So on March 5th, after holding the free speech prisoners for four months to the day, the lumber trust, in the name of the State of Washington, brought the first of them, Thomas H. Tracy, to trial, on a charge of first degree murder, in the King County Court House at Seattle, Washington.
The King County Court House is an imposing, five story, white structure, covering an entire block in the business section of the city of Seattle. Its offices for the conduct of the county and city business are spacious and well appointed. Its corridors are ample, and marble. The elevator service is of the best. But the courtrooms are stuffy little dens, illy ventilated, awkwardly placed, and with the poorest of acoustics. They seem especially designed to add to the depressing effect that invariably attends the administration of "law and order." The court of Judge Ronald, like many other courts in the land, is admirably designed for the bungling inefficiencies of "justice." Yet it was in this theater, thru the medium of the Everett trial, that the class struggle was reproduced, sometimes in tragedy and sometimes in comedy.
To reach the greatest trial in the history of labor unionism, perhaps the greatest also in the number of defendants involved and the number of witnesses called, one had to ascend to the fourth floor of the court house and line up in the corridor under the watchful eyes of the I. W. W. "police," C. R. Griffin and J. J. Keenan, appointed by the organization at the request of the court. There, unless one were a lawyer or a newspaper representative, it was necessary to wait in line for hours until the tiny courtroom was opened and the lucky hundred odd persons were admitted to the church-like benches of J. T. Ronald's sanctum, where the case of State versus Tracy was on trial.
Directly in front of the benches, at the specially constructed press table, were seats provided for the representatives of daily, weekly and monthly publications whose policies ranged from the ultra conservative to the extreme radical. Here the various reporters were seen writing madly as some important point came up, then subsiding into temporary indifference, passing notes, joking in whispers, drawing personal cartoons of the judge, jury, counsel, court functionaries and out-of-the-ordinary spectators,--the only officially recognized persons in the courtroom showing no signs of reverence for the legal priesthood and their mystic sacerdotalism.