By STAN STAPP

THE BIGGEST STRIKE this city ever had was not the one that occurred two months ago (even though some 50,000 demonstrators showed up). It was the Seattle General Strike, 80 years earlier - when on Feb. 6, 1919 protesters began fighting a reduction in wages and a 44-hour work week, "shutting down" Seattle for four days.

This past Nov. 30 to Dec. 3, 1999, the city was also "shut down" for four days, this time by protesters objecting to the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, and its position on world-wide global trade, including environmental and employment issues. Representatives from 135 nations were in attendance.

I closed followed the latter strike scene on television and in the daily papers, including listening to the individual "testimonies" of some 300 protesters who appeared before the City Council. They were filmed and shown and re-shown on Channel 21 a number of times for several weeks.

* * *

I WAS UNABLE to personally observe the 1919 strike, being just a year old at the time - and television not yet invented. However, my dad, Orrill V. Stapp, a music teacher, was there in person all four days. Partly out of curiosity, and partly because his Stapp School of Music studios were located downtown, in Chickering Hall, at Third and University.

The General Strike came at a time when World War I and the Russian Revolution were in the workers' minds. Although profits had risen, wages and working conditions were unsatisfactory - held down by governmental control.

The Stapp family home at that time was in the Greenwood area, 944 N. 84th St. My dad, in addition to being a piano teacher, was also a prolific writer, a poet, and scholarly editorialist for the Wallingford Hill Outlook in its early years - and liked to walk. He was 40 years old at the time.

A decade later, his impressions of the strike were included in a chapter of his "thematic biography" titled: "Unfinished!"

Of the Feb. 6, 1919 General Strike, Orrill wrote: "I, with thousands of other citizens, awoke that morning to find everything had stopped. Hardly a wheel turned in the whole town, from the great streetcar system down to the smallest machine shop. The effect was immediately felt in the stores, the offices, the professions. The absolute cessation of activity was due to more than the mere absence of the usual transportation in a city that is scattered over many hills.

"It was due to more than a sense of fearfulness on the part of the timid. There seemed to be a peculiar, indescribable feeling in the very air. I am sure that many others must have felt as did I - an all-pervading sense of breathless suspension and waiting. There was an illusion of unreality about the whole thing!

"In a great factory, if there is a temporary breakdown in the central power plant, the wheels stop turning, the spindles no longer whirr, the belts no longer whisper and whip. Everything goes dead! Great noise is replaced by unusual silence. The workers stand by: by then - as they expect - after a period of waiting, there is the whirr of wheels, the sound increases, tons of metal become alive with the miracle of power, the singing becomes louder, begins to roar, and things are normal again.

"During the first few hours in Seattle the feeling was much like that. The thing that seemed to be happening was so much more incredible, however, that it was unbelievable that it could continue long. All prophets in the beginning were optimistic. It could not possibly be a matter of more than a few hours. It was inconceivable that an entire city should cease work for any appreciable length of time.

"Three hours - four hours - six - this afternoon - tonight -. The Central Committee is in session. The city administration, civic leaders, have stepped in the breach. All will be adjusted shortly.

"But such prophecies did not come to fulfillment. It was a matter of days, rather than hours. I got downtown from my home in the north end of the city. There were no pupils waiting to be taught in my studios. I spent my time walking about almost continuously. I was determined that I should not take my story of the great social phenomenon at second hand; that I should see for myself, know for myself; and in the end draw my own conclusions.

"So I walked and walked and walked, all day, a big part of each night, and I knew the truth about the general strike in Seattle. The big thing I looked for most was trouble. I searched for it up and down the streets and avenues. But I could not find it! In all the hours of those several days the only trouble I ever saw was a slight disagreement at the cigar stand begun by a man who was obviously drunk. I loitered around the principal corners, especially in the vicinity of the Labor Temple, and in the lower part of the city where radicalism was generally most in evidence.

"Nothing doing! I never saw a country village so quiet on any Sunday in my whole life! Seattle could not have been better behaved if every inhabitant had become a strictly orthodox Baptist and had suddenly run into three Sundays in a row!

"I tried to find a seditious crowd of any size at all on the downtown streets and failed utterly. I never saw Seattle police so consciously lacking for something to do. In the first place, those thousands and thousands of militant laborers were not downtown. I am sure they must have been out in the suburbs with their families, visiting, gardening. They were not looking for trouble, had only stopped work - that was all!

"Two, three persons on the nearly deserted streets would meet and begin talking. In a moment a quiet-voiced man would come along. 'Better move on boys, separate. We don't want to start anything.' I do not remember that I saw so many as a dozen men gathered together in all my miles of walking.

"And yet that was the strike that Seattle's Mayor, Ole Hanson, heralded to the world as a Revolution! Ole had a good imagination - and he cashed in on it. He later published a book about the Seattle Revolution, and went over the country lecturing about it. He certainly managed to give himself a great deal of publicity. The papers were full of the iron verve, the executive ability, of Ole Hanson. Heroic!

"I saw the trucks with their sandbags standing at the police station ready for a charge down the streets against the revolutionary barricades. Ole was not given the least excuse to unlimber his artillery and start his improvised forts rolling along the avenues.

"The strike brought about many humorous incidents. Reports were even spread that the dead impatiently awaited burial - which they were denied by the all powerful and vindictive Central Committee." One night, in an attempt to get home without walking the seven miles (Dad never drove a car) he took an Interurban which was still running, but wouldn't take local passengers or make any stops until well north of the city, a mile beyond his home.

"I listened to the excited conversations on that car, to the charges and counter-charges, to tales of suffering attributed to the strike. A rabid suburban farmer said: 'Yes sir! Would you believe it? Right now I've got a flock of chickens suffering, starving -.' A man across the aisle jumped up, pulling out a pencil and pad. 'Your name and address, sir! I'll guarantee to have food to those chickens within an hour or two!'

"After I got out of the Interurban and walked back home an excited neighbor came running out on his porch and began shouting to a friend a half block away: 'Fill your bathtub! They have blown up the Cedar River Dam!' When I got home Mrs. Brown telephoned: 'They have also blown up the Fremont Bridge!' She said Isabel's husband had to take the steamer to Everett and is coming back on the Interurban as he could not get across the canal!'

"But in a few days the wheels did start, the Seattle General Strike became only history, and Ole Hanson, by all the people I know, is remembered in a kindly spirit, with a twinkle in his eyes."

* * *

SOME QUESTIONS about the WTO strike: Why would you blame the police, even if they occasionally got out-of-hand? You might, too, if the protesters outnumbered you 50-1.

Why would the protesters want to drive Chief of Police Norm Stamper from office (and Mayor Paul Schell, maybe)? They were two of their kindest friends, who got into trouble trying to protect their right to demonstrate. Stamper had even marched in the Gay Parade. (Next time, should there be one, protesters will surely face a tougher mayor and chief of police - ready to enforce the law immediately.)

Why would the protesters espouse free speech for themselves, but deny it to WTO members by blocking their admission to their own meeting?

Why would the protesters think it OK to break windows, loot stores, upset garbage bins and news stands, start fires and scare away shoppers?

Why would most of the protesters who "testified" before the City Council, claim "We won!" - when they'd alienated so many Seattle citizens?

Most of all I feel sorry for the "good" protesters, those who didn't do any of these things; who marched peacefully. For as it turned out the good and the bad got mixed up - and you couldn't tell one from the other.