Teamsters Local 174 grew and evolved in Seattle from 1909 to 1957

Horses, Motors, and a Two-Dollar Wage: The Roots of Seattle’s Teamsters Local 174

Back at the dawn of the twentieth century, the typical American teamster labored through grueling 10- to 12-hour days, seven days a week, pulling in a meager two dollars a day. Goods in Seattle moved primarily by water, but a burgeoning network of roads and streets soon laced the hillsides, relying on horse-drawn carts to haul cargo from the waterfront straight to homes spreading out from downtown. When Teamsters Local 174 officially received its charter in 1909, those early workers drove teams for local fixtures like Frederick & Nelson’s department store, but they quickly recognized that the expanding auto age meant a massive shift toward motor trucks. They brought those new drivers into the fold, setting the stage for a dramatic rise in regional unionization.

The road to permanent influence was anything but smooth. As labor organizers expanded their reach, local enterprises fiercely fought to maintain an open, non-union town. On June 14, 1913, Local 174 walked off the job at Globe Transfer, sparking a broader confrontation when the Team Owners Association flatly refused to negotiate. Armed deputies and Pinkerton guards soon clashed with striking workers on the streets.

While public and union sympathy initially favored the strikers—with Seattle Mayor George Cotterill offering support—the tide turned sharply once the walkout began disrupting basic municipal and commercial services.

Teamsters Local 174 grew and evolved in Seattle from 1909 to 1957

The General Strike and the Rise of Dave Beck

Seattle labor achieved an unprecedented and volatile peak on February 6, 1919, when more than 65,000 workers walked off the job in the nation’s first true general strike. Launched to support shipyard workers fighting remaining wartime federal wage caps, the historic shutdown saw Teamsters leadership initially opposed to the action. Yet rank-and-file members joined the weeklong citywide walkout anyway, helping operate a labor-directed strike committee that maintained vital services like milk delivery.

Yet the Teamsters bucked the broader decline. Enterprising organizers like Dave Beck quietly built up the local and long-haul freight industries one employer at a time. Joining as a laundry driver in 1917 at age 24, Beck quickly climbed the ranks.

Samuel Baca-Henry : 1910 Seattle Teamsters Horse Strike : Street education w/contemporary teamster

By 1929, local Teamster rolls had climbed to 5,000 members. Even a temporary drop to 3,500 following the stock market crash failed to stall their momentum, culminating in the 1931 construction of the Union Hall on Denny Way.

Brewery Workers and Teamsters Fight over Beer Routes

The repeal of Prohibition in 1932 sparked a fierce jurisdictional turf war between the revived Brewery Workers Union and the Teamsters over who controlled beer-truck delivery routes. Tensions boiled over to the point where Frank Brewster—who had become Local 174’s business representative in 1921—was arrested following a violent assault involving lead pipes and competing drivers. The Brewery Workers hired Seattle Mayor John Dore as counsel, who publicly accused Beck and Brewster of attempting to establish a beer monopoly.

Yet politics in the Emerald City proved remarkably fluid. When Dore won a return to the mayor’s office in 1936, his very first official act was appointing Brewster to head the Civil Service Commission.

Frank brewster speaking with robert kennedy

The 1930s brought defeats as well as victories. During the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike, Beck urged Seattle longshoremen to break ranks and cut their own deals with shippers rather than join a general shutdown. The strategy cemented the rival control of Harry Bridges and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union over the docks, even as the strike itself served as a major catalyst for the passage of the 1936 Wagner Act, which established the National Labor Relations Board.

The Teamsters bounced right back in 1936 by backing the American Newspaper Guild’s successful strike against the Seattle Post-Intelligencer—marking one of the first successful strikes by white-collar workers in the U.S. When local newspapers attacked Beck for the intervention, he was attacked by the press.

🐴 ✊ Seattle, 1910: Teamsters strike in defense of horse colleagues

Federal Court Convicts Dave Beck of Grand Larceny

Brewster stepped up to chair the Western Conference in 1953. The union even courted positive public relations through community efforts, such as an all-volunteer operation in 1953 where 39 transfer companies helped move the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital from Queen Anne to Laurelhurst in a single day.

The institutional crest broke quickly thereafter. In 1957, a federal court convicted Dave Beck of grand larceny and aiding and abetting the filing of a fraudulent income-tax return, landing him a five-year prison sentence at McNeil Island while the AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters entirely.

Beck’s downfall fractured Local 174 from the top down. A bitter succession split emerged at the international convention to choose a new general president, leaving Local 174 in court-ordered receivership after an audit flagged questionable bookkeeping and discovered that local leaders George Cavano and Russell Anderson had continued holding office long after their terms expired. A court-mandated election and full financial audit forced a painful process of internal cleansing.

From horse-drawn wagons delivering department store goods at the dawn of the twentieth century to a deeply entrenched political and economic force weathering corruption scandals and internal restructuring, Local 174 survived because the underlying need for worker solidarity outlived its most controversial leaders. The local ultimately weathered these mid-century storms to re-emerge as a progressive anchor of the regional labor movement, ready to face the shifting tides of the globalized economy.

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