Organizing the last big protest of the 20th century was a major undertaking. The contingents set to be involved in disrupting the World Trade Organization’s Third Ministerial Conference — labor unions, politicians, students, environmentalists, Indigenous groups, human-rights watchdogs, Catholic clergy — were not all natural allies, and a year of intensive planning preceded the November 1999 action known thereafter as the Battle in Seattle. The demonstration achieved its first goal quickly, tying up Seattle’s downtown and making it impossible for WTO delegates to get into the conference. The police got outnumbered and then overwhelmed. Ultimately, the conference’s opening ceremony was canceled. The first day of protest stretched into four more. Inside and outside the conference were confrontations and reckonings that still reverberate today.
The internet was still taking shape in 1999, and social media as we know it now didn’t exist. If it had, there’s no question that people watching the coverage on TV would have been arguing about choices and tactics, and debating what the protesters could have and should have done. There would have been people dismayed that protesters failed to prevent property damage, and people who were rooting for Molotov cocktails to fly. Monday-morning protest quarterbacks would insist that the anarchists who began smashing windows were chaos agents planted by the city or possibly the Feds. Everyone would have opinions about the environmentalists who turned out in sea-turtle costumes.
