Can Seattle’s progressives finally learn how to play ball?

by Alex Gallo-Brown

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Seattle residents find themselves in a period of austerity and reaction. The public, weary of progressives’ seeming inability to deal with issues of public safety and homelessness, has turned to the right in recent years, electing a business-friendly mayor who once played football for the University of Washington. The City Council is the most conservative that it has been in decades, its newly elected members content to defer to the prerogatives of the Chamber of Commerce. The city’s baseball team insists on reducing payroll while earning some of the highest profits in the league.

Sports do not usually bring to mind egalitarianism or social justice. From billionaire team owners to millionaire athletes to fervid, fanatical fans, professional sports often exist at the intersection of toxic masculinity, corporate predation, and capitalist spectacle. There are exceptions (female basketball players’ promotion of LGBTQ rights; some football and male basketball players’ support of Black Lives Matter; college athletes’ recent efforts to unionize), but the rule generally holds. So why has Shaun Scott, activist, author, and former socialist candidate for Seattle City Council, devoted an entire book-length work to the history of Seattle’s sports?

For good reason, it turns out. As a historian, Scott is less interested in the politics of sports than sports as a form of politics — the ways in which the games, and the intense frenzies that surround them, provide insights into our larger social systems as a whole. “Athletics are great vaults of fiscal and psychological arrangement, symbols of socioeconomic competition between groups that have more power and those that have less,” Scott writes in his introduction to Heartbreak City: Seattle Sports and the Unmet Promise of Urban Progress (University of Washington Press, 2023). “Our games animate the values and aspirations of our city, in much the same way that love brings out the best and worst from the people in our lives.” Using extensive archival research, Scott exhumes stories of Seattle both familiar and obscure to tell a tale of the Emerald City from beginning to end that, while not altogether flattering, does help to illuminate where the city came from and why we find ourselves in the position that we do today.

In the 1870s, Seattle’s first sports love affair was with the game of baseball, according to Scott. Its first team was called the “Alkis,” a reference to the name given to the city by its founding settlers: “New York Alki,” meaning “New York Eventually” in the Indigenous language of Chinook. From the beginning, city founders imagined a destiny far grander than timber logging, salmon salting, and fur trapping for their remote outpost. They pictured a great American city, a metropolis to rival the illustrious cultural centers of the northeast, replete with world-class art, architecture, and professional sports. When, in 1873, their initial attempt to secure a train line to the city failed (the Northern Pacific built its terminus in neighboring Tacoma instead), the sense of urgency grew. Success on the baseball diamond would demonstrate the vigor and worth of Seattle’s settler community.

Both endeavors flopped. “The city’s lust for baseball glory and train lines crashed at the same destination: abject failure,” Scott writes. The baseball club was not very good, and the train line took decades to come to fruition. When the latter finally prevailed in the 1880s, however, the city’s population boomed (from 40,000 residents in 1890 to 240,000 two decades later), making Seattle a major player in the Pacific Northwest. As the city evolved past its frontier roots to become the economic engine of the region, residents elected new progressive leaders who would build bike lanes, playgrounds, public parks, and schools while cracking down on gambling, prostitution, and civic corruption.

But Seattle’s first progressive movement, which saw itself as a compromise between revolutionary socialists, of which Seattle also had a few, and remorseless capitalists, who owned the local economy, was not without its flaws. Nominally advocates for the common good, progressives could also be racist, eugenicist, and carceral — “social engineers,” in Scott’s characterization, and not always for the better. Still, their best ideas would have almost certainly made the city a more connected, enjoyable, and civically oriented place. In 1912, an ambitious proposal to build a mass subway system, among other major improvements, made the ballot, only to find fierce opposition from business leaders and ultimate defeat at the hands of voters.

Over the next few years, the University of Washington’s football team would win nearly every game that it played, setting a college record of 64 consecutive games without a loss, and its professional hockey team, the Seattle Metropolitans, would bring the city its first national championship in 1917. Seattle entered a period of political regression, its success in the brutalist sports of football and hockey a reflection of its new dog-eat-dog reality.

In retrospect, the biggest flaw of the city’s early progressivism may have been its misunderstanding of politics — its failure to recognize that in order to enact a truly democratic agenda, it would need first to defeat the city’s entrenched economic interests. It was not enough to merely have good ideas; it would need to win the public over to its side. “Over and over in Seattle history,” Scott laments, “one sees progressives self-defeat by underestimating their own strength, potential run after potential run left in scoring position.” For Scott, an urbanist and socialist, this is one of the major lessons that can be gleaned from a history of the city’s sports.

While neither the founders’ dreams of a “New York of the Northwest” nor progressives’ lofty vision of a “city for all” have been fully realized, the city has seen one consistent winner over the past century and a half: the business interests themselves. Long gone are the Seattle Supersonics, auctioned off to a group of Oklahoma businessmen in 2006, but former owner Howard Schultz still remains, as does the headquarters of his company Starbucks, which has made news primarily over the past few years for its relentless union-busting.

Towards the end of Heartbreak City, Scott quotes local historian Roger Sale, who wrote about our city’s first Progressive Era: “The failure of progressive politics lies in the failure of reformers to realize the chances they had to build a political base strong enough to fight interests that held power.” In this timely new book, Scott digs deep into our city’s past to provoke urgent questions about our civic future. Can modern-day progressives regroup, reimagine, and finally construct a coalition that competes to win?

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You can find “Heartbreak City” at bookstores, including the unionized Elliott Bay Books. Scott will be discussing his book with Kurt Streeter at the Seattle Central Library on March 10.

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Alex Gallo-Brown is the author of “Variations of Labor” (Chin Music Press, 2019), a collection of poems and short stories. He works as a union organizer in Seattle.

📸 Featured Image: In “Heartbreak City,” Shaun Scott takes a look at 170 years of Seattle sports, and the insights that brings to the city’s political divisions and triumphs. (Image courtesy of Shaun Scott)

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