On November 5, 1916, 256 members of the Industrial Workers of the World aboard the ferry Verona were met at the Everett City Dock by Snohomish County Sheriff Don McRae and 188 armed deputies. By the time the shooting was over, four IWW members were dead, one was dying, four  were missing, and thirty-one were wounded. On the dock, one deputy lay dead, one was dying, and sixteen were wounded.

Verona (90 minutes; 1080i) challenges the assumptions about what happened on that day and why. Combining archival materials, interviews with experts and descendents of participants, and 3-D computer animation (CGI), Verona encourages the viewer to consider the event from the perspective of someone living through it.

This little-known historical event continues to affect the Pacific Northwest, organized labor, and civil rights law. Though the IWW was virtually shattered by the 1920s, IWW beliefs and tactics re-emerged in labor and civil rights movements throughout the world.

At the heart of the Everett Massacre was the conflict between the need to right social wrongs, the acceptance of duty, the desire for security, the fight for survival, and the struggle for gain—all issues continuously re-emerging and redefining U.S. culture. Realizing how these concerns culminated in the massacre requires understanding the social and political forces influencing Everett at the time and sheds light on how good men came to believe that shooting one another was a reasonable form of conflict resolution.

The whole story of the Everett Massacre has never been told. The IWW perspective, as related in Walker C. Smith’s The Everett Massacre, remains the definitive version of the story. Shirley Suttles, Walker Smith’s youngest daughter, admits in her interview that while her father’s book is a work of history, it is also a very effective work of propaganda—the title of the book became the name of the event—yet propaganda by its very nature is incomplete. The book’s focus on the martyrdom of the Wobblies—a tragedy for the friends and families of those killed, those who survived, and the IWW. as an organization—downplays the disastrous effects of this event on the townspeople, many of whom refused to speak of it publicly for years.

To relay the real story of the Everett Massacre requires intellectual honesty and balanced narrative, and Verona delivers that balance by combining interviews with subject-matter experts and  descendents of participants with archival materials such as period newspapers, movies, and photographs, re-enactments created by computer-generated imagery, and materials gathered from oral histories and discussions with descendents of local union activists, gives Verona a balance of perspectives.

By offering balance, Verona gives the viewer enough information to actually feel what it would have been like on the dock that day. The greatest ambition of any documentary is to move a viewer into becoming a participant. Verona can help the viewer imagine being a Wobbly, citizen-deputy, resident, cop, mill owner, or mill worker, thereby understanding the needs, hopes, and fears that set each on the path to this tragedy.

I hope Verona sparks discussion about civil rights and security. I hope it will offer a way to imagine what the time and place were like, how these people convinced themselves that what they were doing was right. Most of all, I hope this motion picture allows viewers to understand that while we all would like our heroes to be wholly good and our villains to be wholly evil, they are neither. But that doesn’t make them any less human.