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More important, he was to watch for outsiders—suspicious characters looking for trouble. The city seemed to be full of such individuals in 1935. For months, the transit workers had been on strike, complaining they couldn’t feed their families on their meager wages from the city. Spokane’s political leaders would not budge. There was no money to fill potholes, no money for jail food, no money for parks, no money for the zoo, which closed its doors and gave away the animals, and no money for city workers. After several months, they began to hire scabs from the ranks of the farmer families pouring in from Oklahoma and Texas. The striking workers went on a rampage, smashing windows at transit headquarters and blowing up one transit car with dynamite. During a riot, the entire police force was called out to smash heads and arrest strikers.
    Then there were the new workers from the East, blacks mostly, who’d been sent from such places as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago to Spokane for three-dollar-a-day government jobs. In 1935, Roosevelt introduced the Works Progress Administration—the centerpiece of his New Deal job program. The West was treated like a long-neglected yard, ready for chores. The newcomers from the East were put to work building a road to Mount Spokane, north of the city around Deadman’s Creek. They slept under big tents or assembled shacks of their own. By day, they were given picks and shovels and told to plow their way up the mountain. At night, many of the men came in for a drink at Jimmy Young’s, a second-floor walk-up just two blocks from the police station, or for a dance at the Cotton Club, on First Avenue, a few blocks the other way. Too often, a Saturday night’s relaxation turned into a vagrancy charge.
    The city leaders had a particular distrust of anyone who attemptedto disrupt the political order. For the first three decades of the twentieth century, Spokane enforced laws that made free assembly, public speaking, and certain demonstrations illegal. Since the Cowles family controlled both newspapers—a profitable monopoly—the hardy perennials who held office were invariably Protestant Republicans approved by the paper’s editorial board. The raw political energy down below, where the vice pits and shantytowns clustered along the river’s shore, was feared, and not easily cornered. It could spring from the compost of discontent—a beer parlor, a union hall, a Civilian Conservation Corps hiring camp—and quickly take hold. The city’s solution was to outlaw certain types of free speech.
    Spokane had changed very little since the most famous fight over free speech. In 1908, members of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union, known as the Wobblies, converged on the city to stage a public-speaking marathon. Several hundred Wobblies who were trying to organize timber and mining camps had been arrested, charged with being union rabble rousers. To protest the arrests, thousands of Wobblies came to Spokane from all over the West. They arrived with soapboxes and took up positions on the street, where they proceeded to advocate revolution, unionism, one-worldism, and a host of other utopian ideals. The city council promptly passed a law prohibiting street speeches, and when the Wobs held forth from their soapboxes as usual, they were arrested. The jail was so full that a nearby high school had to be opened up in order to hold all the street orators. The Salvation Army took exception to the new law, so the council passed a loophole, which outlawed free speech in public places except that with musical accompaniment. In response, the Wobs starting singing their slogans. They were still arrested. Even in 1935, long after most of the Wobblies had faded away, the official yearbook of the Spokane Police Department recorded dozens of arrests for speaking without a permit or handing out flyers without a license.
    Bill Parsons made his rounds, a bit confused by the rules he was supposed to