The terrible and deadly “Battle of Centralia” has had countless books written about it — some famous, some essential, some all-but forgotten. A new book, being released next week, might be one of the best at humanizing the neighbors who killed one another on the streets of the Hub City in 1919.
Julie McDonald Zander, well known to Chronicle readers as a columnist on these pages for nearly two decades, turned the prelude and aftermath of the Armistice Day Tragedy into a novel called “Shattered Peace: A Century of Silence.”
I read a pre-publication review copy of the book and loved it. (Disclosure: I’ve worked with Zander on many projects over the years. I write this as both a friend and fan.)
“Shattered Peace” tells the story of a modern-day Navy Seabee who comes to Centralia to get a new start and renovate her grandmother’s old home. There she discovers a long-forgotten diary and cache of letters hidden in the walls. They tell the secret story of her great-great-grandparents a hundred years earlier.
She sees how her family and those around them suffered through war, the dangers of working in early-day logging and the plague of Spanish influenza. They also tell of daily concerns like jobs, dances, church and falling in love.
Through these fictional characters, Zander — a longtime journalist and historian with an unwavering dedication to truth and accuracy — weaves the factual threads of history. We begin to see the characters walking paths that lead them into the firefight and lynching of Nov. 11, 1919.
What I love most about this book is that it humanizes the people who ended up in warring camps. We walk many harrowing miles in their shoes.
The Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies), the militant labor union that wanted to overthrow the capitalist class, are presented in both their radical stripes and as composed of regular boys from the towns of Lewis County who saw the dangers and death in the woods and were attracted to a group that would fight for them. We see how they came to the decision to arm themselves and defend their union hall by force.
On the other hand, Zander takes us into the trenches of World War I as other local young men slog through battles and lose their brothers-in-arms for their country. As they come home and form the American Legion, we see how they decide to take up arms again to defend what they see as their way of life and community’s livelihood from Wobbly revolutionaries.
Within a few pages, “Shattered Peace” shows us both young men killed in battle in France and killed by falling trees on the Olympic Peninsula. The survivors are stunned and lost but must swallow their grief and press on. Eventually they harden into different camps. We see how the blood shed on Tower Avenue on Armistice Day 1919 actually began flowing months and years before.
While we are shown a complex world through many different perspectives, Zander doesn’t surrender to fashionable modern moral relativism. We see the reality of good people in desperate times making hard choices and facing consequences for their mistakes.
One character, a former soldier who had only recent dined with the Wobbly organizer and agitator Wesley Everest, is there at “hangman’s bridge” as the firebrand is brutally lynched in retaliation for the beloved men of the town killed earlier that day after a parade gone horribly wrong.
The veteran is horrified when his beloved fiance sees him that terrible night, lost in the rage that was born in France and came home with him like a curse.
“Would she ever look at him again with love in those beautiful emerald eyes? He couldn't face her. She'd glimpsed in Centralia the horrors of the war he had lived with in France — gunfire, bloodshed, death. His sweet Irish girl, her image of him forever tarnished by the evil he'd witnessed overseas and now home in Centralia.”
We see loss but we see healing and even hope.
Zander not only brings life into dusty history, she also tells a vibrant story about a modern-day soldier healing from her own wounds. We go from bombs tearing through the trenches of World War I to improvised explosive devices blowing Americans to bits in Iraq a century later. As the Centralians of 1919 come to terms with their violence, their 21st century descendant also tries to climb out of her own battlefield losses and despair.
War has broken people since time began. The tragedy sometimes called “the Centralia Massacre” was born of brokenness and division, and continues to divide people more than a century later. Casting one side as victims and another as brutes is how the story has often been told.
Zander has done something different and remarkable. She has humanized all sides and shown us how redemption is possible.
“Shattered Peace” is a good book about a bad time. Its story leads us through the valley of the shadow of death to the hope of souls restored to life beside still waters.
We come to see that for people crippled by war and loss — and for a town eager to forget its worst days — there is a path to peace beyond the brokeness.
Brian Mittge is a community enthusiast who has written for The Chronicle since 2000 as a reporter, editor and columnist. He can be reached at brianmittge@hotmail.com.
