Labor Day is the holiday we’ve sanded down into a long weekend. A last cookout, a final dip in the river, a big-box sale or two. But beneath the sunscreen and the discounts, Labor Day has always been about more than rest — it’s about work, and the arguments over what work means, who benefits, and how we live together. And if you dig into Skagit County’s past, you’ll find that those arguments weren’t just shouted across picket lines. They were printed, pressed, and mailed.
In 1897, the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth planted the seeds of the Equality Colony near Edison. Their goal was audacious: prove socialism worked in practice, and from there, reshape America. To do this, they needed not just plows and hammers, but a press. By 1898, they were printing Industrial Freedom on a double-cylinder machine — 7,000 copies in the first run. It was more than ink on paper. It was their workshop of ideas, their town hall in newsprint.
And crucially, it was an invitation to debate. When the Puget Sound Mail — yes, our predecessor — reviewed the colony’s first issue, it did so with raised eyebrows. The Mail seemed surprised that the new socialist paper wasn’t railing against wealthy men. “This is contrary to the general policy pursued by the socialist press,” the Mail sniffed, as if socialism’s job were to swing a rhetorical hammer at every banker in sight.
The editors of Industrial Freedom snapped right back, with wit that still stings more than a century later: “No, friend Mail, your surprise is occasioned by what you THOUGHT socialist papers say, instead of knowing what they DO say.” Read us carefully, they advised, and prepare for more surprises.
That exchange matters. It shows that newspapers were never just record-keepers; they were sparring partners in the public square. Labor movements, political visions, even utopian experiments depended on papers that didn’t just inform but provoked, cajoled, and challenged their neighbors. Not with social media pile-ons, but actual, reasoned debate.
Equality Colony ultimately collapsed, undone by the typical conflicts between socialists and anarchists that would repeat in other movements throughout the last century. Industrial Freedom itself folded in 1903. But their paper, for a brief spell, modeled something we desperately need again: Argument that educates rather than isolates, disagreement that still listens.
So this Labor Day, while we fire up our grills, let’s raise a glass not just to the workers who built our roads and schools, but also to the scrappy editors who dared to pick a fight in print. If we forget how to argue with wit, rigor, and ink, we lose more than a holiday’s meaning — we lose the muscle that keeps democracy limber.
Kari Mar is the editor and publisher of La Conner Community News.
