-Guest post by Deborah J. Isley, volunteer Snoqualmie Valley Museum
In the early morning hours of November 28, 1933, Snoqualmie residents were jolted awake by a massive percussive force that shook their windows and sent tremors through the town.
At 4:20am, a bomb exploded inside the Golden Rule Dairy plant, blowing the roof clean off and sending wooden shrapnel like spears into a building twenty-five feet away. Investigators at the site later estimated that at least six sticks of dynamite were used in the blast that destroyed four cold rooms, a compressor, and caused at least $12,000 in damage to the building and equipment (about $300,000 in 2026).
Fortunately, no one was at the dairy plant at the time of the explosion. The night fire marshal, Tom Benadon, arrived quickly at the scene but saw no one fleeing, leading investigators to believe that the dynamite was set for a delayed explosion. Benadon quickly extinguished a small fire at the site. The entire crew of the Golden Rule dairy plant arrived within 30 minutes. Remarkably, workers were able to clear debris in time for the 8am delivery drivers to receive most of their dairy products, minus the butter, which was largely destroyed in the initial blast.
Golden Rule Dairy owner William H. Pemberton seemed to shrug off this brazen violence. He told the Seattle Star newspaper that “we are making very little butter now and the explosion will not cause any great difficulty in that department. As soon as the debris has been cleared away milk and cream operations will be continued.” He also noted that the damage would be covered under the insurance policy he obtained from a London company. Reportedly, no American company would insure the dairy because this was not the first time the business had been attacked, and it would not be the last.
The Golden Rule Bakery and Dairy began operating in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle in 1917. Pemberton, an Irish immigrant, refused to report for the March 1918 draft, stating that as an Irishman he could not fight on England’s behalf. Court-martialed and sentenced, he served time until 1919 or 1920 while his sister Maud ran the bakery. Over the 1920s, the operation expanded into the Snoqualmie Valley, establishing a dairy and plant in the town of Snoqualmie.
Golden Rule did not have a union, a so-called “open shop,” but Pemberton went further than simply refusing to unionize. He was ideologically opposed to organized labor and said so publicly. He operated on a vendor system, similar to the independent contractor model used by rideshare companies today. Drivers owned their own trucks, or purchased them from the company on installment, then bought dairy products at wholesale and resold them at retail, bearing all the financial risk themselves. More troubling still, if a driver proved successful and built a profitable route, Pemberton reportedly split it and reassigned portions to other drivers, leaving the original driver back where he started.
Working conditions for other employees were no better. A pro-union publication, The Washington Veteran, reported in March of 1935 that workers regularly worked far beyond their scheduled hours without compensation. “The men are said to be afraid to file claims covering extra hours worked. They know that if Pemberton learned of their action it would mean their jobs. And jobs are all too scarce these days.”
The Great Depression fueled labor conflicts in the Pacific Northwest. Pemberton noted that he started receiving threats from local union organizers and survived at least one failed bomb attempt in the spring of 1930. The Seattle Milk Wagon Drivers’ Union had 600 members in 1933 and had wide influence over dairies and grocers. Still, companies like Golden Rule refused to cooperate, and threats, intimidation, and violence followed.
On February 23, 1931, night watchmen thwarted another bombing attempt at the Fremont plant. Just three days later, on February 26, an explosion at the Golden Rule Bakery was heard from Magnolia to Lake Washington. Dynamite, believed stolen from Sand Point Naval base, blew out one wall of the bakery, sending bricks flying through the air and injuring 22-year-old bakery worker Charles Short. The blast occurred between shifts around 10:10pm, possibly sparing workers’ lives. In a sign of the times, the explosion also blew out the windows of a building north of the bakery, exposing a large bootlegging operation next door.
After this bombing, Pemberton was defiant, telling The Seattle Daily Times that he was “not going to join a union or any such organization, no matter what happens.” He ran a full-page ad in the Seattle Daily Times offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to arrests and convictions. Police arrested one notorious ex-police officer and convicted felon, Ed Hagen, for the dynamite theft and bombing, but could not bring the case to trial after a key witness disappeared.
In February 1932, a kerosene bomb placed under a window at the Snoqualmie plant failed to ignite. The conflict was spreading beyond Seattle. The following month, Snoqualmie Mayor Claude Northern, a mechanic who often serviced Golden Rule delivery trucks, found his garage walls and floor soaked in gasoline, but whoever poured it never struck a match. Northern reported that he had received a threatening letter a week before ordering him to stop working on Golden Rule trucks, signed simply “a worker.” With strong winds and low water pressure from recent flooding, a fire there could have been catastrophic for downtown Snoqualmie.
Despite this escalation, the dispute seemed to calm down until the November 1933 bombing in Snoqualmie. Following that blast, intimidation of delivery drivers, farmers, and grocers increased. Accused by dairy officials of not properly addressing the violence, King County Sheriff Claude Bannick reportedly provided armed guards on delivery trucks for a time, but the financial cost was too great.
Then, on March 1, 1934, the Snoqualmie Valley Record reported that “bold, bad bandits are abroad in the Snoqualmie Valley, and again the Golden Rule Dairy is their victim.” Snoqualmie resident and Golden Rule delivery driver Wendell Murphy was driving his truck from Fall City toward Redmond with his wife and her friend, Mrs. Nelson. A small coupe with two men pulled alongside the truck, and one man brandished what Murphy believed to be a machine gun. Murphy was ordered to drive the truck back to Snoqualmie. Murphy told the Snoqualmie Valley Record that one man “stood on the running board of my truck, his rifle under his arm, and made me drive around for some time.”
At some point, they reached Carnation Farms, were directed off the highway, and ordered to get out. Murphy tried to explain that the truck belonged to him, not the company, but the men sent it careening down a forty-foot embankment toward the river. The truck and its contents, all owned by Murphy, were destroyed. Once again, no one was ever arrested for this crime.
Over the next year, Golden Rule delivery drivers, particularly in Seattle, were followed and harassed. Some residents reported that Golden Rule milk deliveries were destroyed after delivery. Newspapers like the Washington Veteran printed scathing articles criticizing Pemberton’s business practices. Union and non-union drivers alike began carrying concealed weapons, and at least one confrontation devolved into drivers wielding milk bottles as clubs. The Seattle Star reported that County Prosecutor Warren G. Magnuson stepped in to broker a temporary truce in August of 1935, stating that “somebody’s going to get killed if this keeps on.” Seattle Police Chief W. B. Kirtley said that police would arrest any union or non-union driver found carrying a concealed weapon.
Reports of violence decreased in the press following the summer of 1935. William H. Pemberton died in May of 1936, and the company’s resistance to unionization died with him. Just one month later, local union leaders, acting Golden Rule president Jack Noser, and company treasurer Maud Pemberton, negotiated an agreement to open Golden Rule to union workers in line with other local dairy companies.
The Seattle area’s ‘milk wars’ were one front in a broader war between workers and employers. Across the 1930s Pacific Northwest, labor unrest and violence were widespread in the lumberyards, canneries, and ports. Yet the Golden Rule dairy conflict that began on Seattle streets eventually blew the roof off a building in Snoqualmie, sent a truck over an embankment near Carnation, and left a valley mayor staring at a gasoline-soaked garage floor.
-Featured Image: PO.040.1351. Milk Delivery Trucks in the Snoqualmie Valley, likely taken in the 1930s.
