by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
Solidarity, August 19, 1916.
In the Southwest, Wobblies stepped up their organizing campaign in Arizona’s four metal mining districts in the fall of 1916. By 1917 their agitation won support from some members of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (formerly the W.F.M.) and several A.F.L. unions who joined them in a general walkout in June and July 1917. Following the declaration of war in 1917, wages in the copper camps fell far below the wartime price increase in copper. The copper companies met the unions’ demands for wage increases with a consistent refusal to adjust or arbitrate grievances.
The Arizona strike was denounced as “pro-German,” as the companies stockpiled arms and ammunition, organized vigilante committees, hired additional guards and gunmen, and publicly declared their intention of removing labor agitators from the area. The Bisbee, Arizona, sheriff wired the state’s governor that most of the strikers were foreigners, that the strike appeared to be a pro-German plot, and that bloodshed was expected imminently.
On July 6, 1917, a Loyalty League was organized in Globe, Arizona. It resolved
that terrorism in this community must and shall cease; that all public assemblies of the I.W.W. as well as all other meetings where treasonable, incendiary, or threatening speeches are made shall be oppressed; that we hold the I.W.W. to be a public enemy of the United States; that we absolutely oppose any mediation between the I.W.W. and the mine owners of this district; that after settlement … [we are] opposed to employment of any I.W.W. in this district; that all citizens deputized be retained as such.9
Within a few days the Loyalty League circulated application blanks to all citizens in Globe and Miami. They announced: “Every refusal will be noted…. We will take an inventory of the citizenship of the district…. The names of I.W.W. members and sympathizers are wanted.”10 The Loyalty League boycotted those who would not sign.
Four days later, sixty-seven I.W.W. members were rounded up in Jerome, Arizona, forced into cattle cars, and shipped to Needles, California. Two days later the Bisbee Loyalty League surpassed this performance. An organized posse of over 1000 citizens, wearing white handkerchiefs around their arms to identify each other, were deputized by the sheriff. They took over the telegraph office of the town so that no news of the raid would leak out. Rounding up 1200 I.W.W. members, townspeople, and sympathizers, they drove them to a ball park at the edge of town, where a “kangaroo court” asked them to choose between returning to work, arrest, or deportation. Close to 1200 were loaded in groups of fifty into a twenty-seven car cattle train. Guarded by 200 deputies, the train ended up in Hermanas, New Mexico, where the prisoners were kept for thirty-six hours without food before being sent by federal authorities to Columbus, New Mexico. Here they were put into a stockade under army guard and kept until the middle of September, when the camp was disbanded because the federal government refused to continue supplying food.
Most of the deportees returned to Bisbee. Some were arrested; others were allowed to stay unmolested. A year later, a federal grand jury indicted twenty-one leaders of the Bisbee Loyalty League. None was convicted.
The President’s Mediation Commission sent in to settle the strike and investigate the deportations, found that of the 1200 deportees, 381 were A.F.L. members; 426 were Wobblies; and 360 belonged to no labor organization. It also found that 662 were either native-born or naturalized citizens, 62 had been soldiers or sailors, 472 were registered under the Selective Service Act, 205 owned Liberty Bonds, and 520 subscribed to the Red Cross. The foreign-born deportees included 179 Slavs, 141 Britishers, 82 Serbians, and only a handful of Germans.
The copper mining strikes in Arizona were ended by the deportations and by the President’s Mediation Commission which investigated the situation in October 1917. The commission reported that the strikes were neither pro-German, nor seditious, but “appeared to be nothing more than the normal results of the increased cost of living, the speeding up processes to which the mine management had been tempted by the abnormally high market price of copper.”11 Its settlement, however, excluded any miner who spoke disloyally against the government or who was a member of an organization which refused to recognize time contracts. Thus, as Perlman and Taft have written, the commission put the I.W.W. “beyond the pale.”12
The copper companies were protected by the umbrella of the Sabotage Act of 1918, which classified the mines as “war premises” and their output as “war materials.” Army troops which had been sent in during the 1917 Arizona strike were given the authority “to disperse or arrest persons unlawfully assembled at or near any war premise’ for the purpose of intimidating, alarming, disturbing, or injuring persons lawfully employed thereon, or molesting or destroying property thereat.”13
Federal troops stayed in Arizona until 1920 in an effort to curb the “Wobbly menace.” They protected strikebreakers, dispersed street crowds, guarded mine property, broke up public meetings, and patrolled “troublesome” sections of the community. They were billeted in quarters built for them by the mine owners and were brought up-to-date on industrial conditions by reports of private company detectives.
As Perlman and Taft wrote of the I.W.W. and A.F.L. efforts in the Arizona copper camps: “Unionism of either variety failed to survive the experiences of 1917.”14
In June 1917 fire broke out on the 2400-foot level of the Speculator Mine in Butte and killed 164 miners who were smothered or burned to death. It was one of the worst mining tragedies in history. In the words of a Butte miner:
They were caught like rats in a trap by the explosion of gas in the lower levels, the exits of which were blocked by solid concrete bulkheads with no opening in them. The holocaust was the last straw. The miners, galling under abuses and working under conditions which endangered their lives every minute underground, decided to call a halt to this condition of affairs and not return to work until assured by the operators that the conditions would be corrected and the lives of miners fully protected.15
Miners charged that the tragedy was caused by the mine company’s disregard for safety regulations. Trapped on the lower levels, they clawed at concrete bulkheads which the company had built instead of the steel manholes required by the law. Over half of the bodies were so badly burned they were unable to be identified.
Fourteen thousand incensed Butte miners immediately struck for adequate safety provisions in all the mines, an increase in wages, and the absolute abolition of the rustling card system. Under the leadership of Tom Campbell who had run against Charles Moyer in the 1912 W.F.M. convention, an independent Metal Mine Workers Union was formed. The I.W.W. members set up the Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union No. 800, which numbered about 1200 members in 1917.
Again, martial law was declared in Butte. The press screamed “sedition,” “enemy of the government,” and “pro-German,” and once more stereotyped the strike as I.W.W. inspired. Company owners refused to meet the unions’ grievance committees. W. A. Clark of the Clark mining interests declared that he would rather flood his mines than concede to strikers’ demands. The miners held a mass meeting and petitioned the government to take over the mines, “so that the miners may give prompt and practical evidence of their patriotism.” 16 They also lodged a formal protest against the rustling card system with Secretary of Labor Wilson, which led to a later investigation of labor conditions in Butte.
In July the Anaconda Company agreed to an increase in wages, but refused to give up the rustling card system, although holding out the inducement of a “temporary card” which could be used until a miner’s record was fully checked. The strikers refused this offer.
In the early morning of August 1, 1917, a group of gunmen broke into the boardinghouse room of I.W.W. organizer Frank Little. He had been an I.W.W. member since 1906 and was one of the leaders of the Missoula, Spokane, and Fresno free speech fights. A member of the I.W.W. Executive Board, Little had come to Butte from the Mesabi Range. In August 1916 he had been arrested at Iron River, Michigan, taken out of jai
l, beaten, threatened with lynching, and left unconscious in a ditch with a rope around his neck.
Solidarity, August 26, 1916.
George Tompkins, a Butte miner, told what happened to Little in Butte:
At 3 o’clock in the morning of August 1st, six masked, heavily armed men broke down the door of Little’s room and dragged him from his room in his night clothes, placed him in an auto, and took him to a railroad trestle at the edge of the town, and there hanged him. To his dead body was pinned a card which read, “First and Last Warning—3-7-77,” followed by the first letters of the names of prominent members of the strikers, which indicated that the perpetrators of the crime intended more violence on other members of the strikers.17
The numbers 3-7-77 was the sign used by the old-time vigilantes in Adder Gulch, Montana, to threaten road agents with death. They signified the dimensions of a grave.
Little’s funeral was one of the largest the state had ever seen. The five-mile route to the cemetery was lined with thousands of miners. The Butte Miner of August 6, 1917, wrote:
Funeral paraders in silent protest…. 2,514 in procession in demonstration against lynching…. Remains of Frank H. Little, I.W.W. Board Member, are borne down principal streets of Butte on the shoulders of red-sashed pallbearers marching through solid lanes of many thousand spectators…. Brief services at cemetery.18
A band played the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.
Gradually, the strikers drifted back to work, accepted small wage increases, and the modified rustling card system. The strike ended in December 1917.
But the federal troops which had been called in the year before, stayed on in Butte until 1921. The head of the Butte “Council of Defense” warned:
The minute the military here stop detaining men for seditious acts we have got to take it into our own hands and have a mob and we don’t want to start that. I can get a mob up here in twenty-four hours and hang half a dozen men.19
Mine owner W. A. Clark stated, “I don’t believe in lynching or violence of that kind unless it is absolutely necessary.”20 While the troops remained at Butte, the Chamber of Commerce reported, “Every businessman … feels perfectly safe.”21
Historian William Preston, the author of a recent study on suppression of radicals during the World War I period, described what followed the end of the 1917 strike:
Anaconda seemed intent on a show down. Its detective informers were high in the ranks of the Butte I.W.W. In violently incendiary speeches, these company provocateurs encouraged their cohorts to adopt a position that the government would define as seditious and disloyal. In other words, the copper company was having its paid agents help organize a wartime strike against itself as a ruse for the indictment and elimination of the local radical menace.22
Professor Preston’s footnote to this information stated, “The special agent of the Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorney Wheeler discovered and reported the existence of these company provocateurs.”23
When the Butte I.W.W. local did strike on September 13, 1918, army troops, swelled by private detectives, local police, and mine officials, raided the I.W.W. hall, the hall of the independent radical Metal Mine Workers’ Union, and the offices and printing plant of the radical newspaper, the Butte Bulletin. They confiscated literature and records, arrested and jailed forty miners, and put the union halls and newspaper office under military guard. In the next few days the army arrested seventy-four additional miners without warrants, charged them with sedition, and held them for investigation by the Department of Justice. All but one were later released for lack of evidence on which charges against them could be made.
The Butte I.W.W. strike culminated in April 1920 with the incident called the “Murder of Anaconda Hill,” in which mine guards armed with rifles and machine guns, fired on pickets marching in front of the Neversweat Mine. Fourteen strikers were wounded and one man was killed. The Butte Daily Bulletin issued an extra edition a short time after the shooting. The newspaper had the following headline set in 96 point type. This, it charged, was the order mine company officials had given to the guards:
SHOOT THE SONS OF BITCHES
The newspaper edition, as well as the Butte I.W.W. strike, was suppressed.
1
In 1913 and 1914, Ralph Chaplin wrote a series of poems, signed “by a Paint Creek Miner” which he sent to the International Socialist Review. In his autobiography, Chaplin wrote: “At the time we had moved to Westmoreland [W. Va.], the daily papers were carrying stories about the strike in Kanawha County, but they were far from being of headline importance. Even at meetings of the Socialist local, little attention was then given to that strike. It had started in 1911 as a spontaneous unorganized protest against an accumulation of grievances. The officials of the miners’ union [U.M.W.] ignored it. After months of neglect and inattention it was discovered that the smoldering discontent was assuming ominous proportions. That was just about the time I became associate editor of the Labor Star [Huntington (W. Va.) Socialist and Labor Star]. At this stage the mine-owners were preparing to reinforce their private guards with state militia and with professional gunmen recruited through the Baldwin-Felts agency. From that time on reports of the slugging and manhandling of miners began to trickle through. Then came stories of skirmishes and shooting on both sides …
Solidarity, September 9, 1916.
”In spite of a budding desire to be objective and ‘constructive,’ my passion was aroused by the brutalities of the strike … The inadequacy of strike relief and of publicity seemed to me inexcusable. The horrible conditions in Kanawha County were not arousing indignation beyond the borders of the state. One or two of my ‘Faint Creek Miner sonnets had been reprinted in the Review and the Masses. Beyond that, to my knowledge, no word was reaching the outside world. In the strike zone, however, one of my sonnets, a vitriolic thing titled ‘Mine Guard? created a sensation. Someone with a rare sense of recognition tacked it on Captain Fred Lester’s door … At that time Lester was decidedly unpopular with the miners. He had just been promoted from the state guard to a captaincy in the Baldwin-Felts outfit.
“This incident which transformed the situation from a strike into a small scale civil war was the ‘Bull Moose Special.’ We were tipped off in Huntington that an armored train was being rigged up at the Chesapeake and Ohio yards for use against the miners … We spread a warning to the hills and waited anxiously for newspaper headlines announcing new atrocities. We didn’t have to wait long. It was at Holly Grove. In the dead of night, with all ligjnts extinguished, the armored train drew up over the sleeping tent colony and opened fire with rifles and machine guns. Wooden shacks were splintered and tents riddled with bullets. One woman was reported to have both legs broken by the rain of lead. A miner holding an infant in his arms, and running from his tent to shelter in a dugout, fell, seriously wounded. The baby, by some miracle was unhurt, but it was reported that three bullet holes had tattered the edge of her calico dress. Men, women, and children ran hastily through the night, seeking the cold shelter of the woods . .
Chaplin described a trip he and Elmer Rumbaugh made to collect information for an article, immediately after the Holly Grove incident. He wrote: “In every town we passed, miners were gathered in little anxious groups. Feeling was running high. I heard miners saying on every side, ‘Just wait until the leaves come out!’ This remark puzzled me until the desperate implications became apparent. The leafless hillsides made the miners targets for enemy fire and exposed their movements when they were seeking points of vantage from which to take pot shots at guards and militiamen…. At two roadway junctions we could plainly see the yellow wigwams of the militiamen, with stacked rifles glistening beside them. Several times we caught glimpses of machine guns overlooking the frail tent colonies of the miners.”
“When we were on our way back home hell broke loose in the entire Kanawha Valley. We were caught in the midst of it. Armed miners from all parts of the state were on the
march with the avowed purpose of destroying the hated ‘Death Train.’ … There were hundreds of incidents … We passed through a district where, in a single engagement, sixteen men had been killed or, as the strikers put it, ‘four men and twelve gun thugs’ … We were exposed to intermittent fire for three full days before we finally caught a freight back to Charleston. I arrived in Westmoreland once more, dog-tired and black with cinders, I sat down at the kitchen table and scribbled stanzas of ‘When the Leaves Come Out.’ It had been tormenting me all the way home. It has tormented me, in a different way, many times since then, because I have found it tucked away in too many miners’ homes.”
“The Kanawha Striker,” “Mine Guard,” and “When the Leaves Come Out,” which were printed in the International Socialist Review (1914), were collected in a privately printed edition of Chaplin’s early poems, When The Leaves Come Out (Chicago, 1917). Ralph Chaplin sent the manuscripts to Miss Inglis who included them in the file on Ralph Chaplin in the Labadie Collection.
THE KANAWHA STRIKER
By RALPH CHAPLIN
Good God! Must I now meekly bend my head
And cringe back to that gloom I know so well?
Forget the wrongs my tongue may never tell,