There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Heartened by the ease with which the Jerome town fathers had acted, authorities in Bisbee, Arizona, made a similar assault on the IWW. Even before the onset of American involvement in the First World War and its related demand for copper, Bisbee—its Copper Queen mine the richest source of copper in the country—had become a desert boomtown controlled by Phelps, Dodge & Company; by 1908 it had eight thousand residents, new schools, hospitals, churches, a YMCA, and a well-stocked library. European immigrants, mostly Slavs and Finns, as well as Mexican workers, arrived in droves. Bisbee’s development had been guided by the paternalistic corporate welfare philosophy of Dr. James Douglas of Phelps Dodge. In 1911, however, Douglas’s son Walter had assumed control as general manager. Strongly suspicious of labor, he not only toughened conditions for Phelps Dodge miners but dedicated his efforts to speaking out against mine unionization generally. In part his views were a reaction to the state’s adoption of a number of union-friendly policies written when Arizona attained statehood in 1912, measures that put Phelps Dodge on the defensive. Like John D. Rockefeller Jr. at Colorado Fuel, Walter Douglas vowed to shutter the Copper Queen before he’d allow a union in, saying, “We will not compromise with rattlesnakes.”5

  In late June 1917 the Bisbee local of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, many of whom were also members of the IWW, struck for increased wages of $6 a day, for more men assigned to operate mechanical equipment, and reform of the system by which Phelps Dodge deducted from the miners’ weekly paychecks for water and electricity and the rental of worker housing. Another demand was that the company’s sham physical examinations, by which able-bodied men were frequently excluded from work because of their political convictions, be stopped. By all accounts the strike was peaceful, but the presence of “labor radicals” worried local authorities, and white sensibilities were inflamed after Mexican men affiliated with the IWW transgressed local custom by approaching American women employed in a laundry, ostensibly to see if they would join the union. The Wobblies, with their ambitions for “one big union” inclusive of all races and both genders, clearly posed an unacceptable threat.

  Adding to local tensions was the conviction held by Sheriff Harry Wheeler and other Cochise County authorities that strikes which hindered war-related production were both unpatriotic and dangerous. “At a time when our country needs her every resource,” read a public proclamation issued by Wheeler, “these strangers persist in keeping from her the precious metal production of this entire district…. We cannot longer stand nor tolerate such conditions. This is no labor trouble. We are sure of that. But it is a direct attempt to embarrass the government of the United States.”6 He also had reason to worry about border security. Only five months earlier Germany had sent the infamous Zimmerman telegram, offering to restore Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico to the Mexican government if Mexico would attack the United States, and there had been fears along the border for years of encroachments by Mexican armies associated with the revolutionary Pancho Villa. President Wilson, it was widely believed, had not done enough to protect American citizens from the possibility of such incursions.

  Wheeler, along with a two-thousand-member vigilante organization calling itself the Citizens’ Protective League, launched a campaign to oust the Wobblies and any strikers who would not agree to return to work. At dawn on July 12, Wheeler—with the help of Phelps Dodge officers—cut off all phone, telegraph, and rail service to Bisbee; he then deputized and distributed weapons to those League members who had none, and set the white-armbanded legions to scour the town “until the last IWW is run out.”7 It was reported that “armed men went through lodging houses and restaurants questioning everyone. Two men, a League member and a miner, were killed in a shoot-out when the miner fired at those who had come to apprehend him. Those who did not answer satisfactorily to questioning were marched between lines of citizens to the park.”8 At this baseball field in the adjacent town of Warren, nearly thirteen hundred Wobblies and IWW-loyal miners (and three women sympathizers) were collected and informed of their imminent deportation from the state. An automobile fitted with a machine gun and manned by Wheeler’s men stood by, visible to the captives.

  Despite their protests that their wives and families were in Bisbee, that they owned property, had bank accounts, and had lived in the town for as long as fifteen years, the men were herded into twenty-four boxcars of a waiting freight train. William B. Cleary, a local attorney who sided with the strikers, dispatched an urgent telegram to a federal mediator—“Two thousand miners being deported this morning by corporation gunmen from Warren district; stop that train!”—but Cleary himself was soon collared and forced into a boxcar.9 At some point Arizona’s assistant attorney general, Louis Whitney, got wind of what was taking place and demanded of Sheriff Wheeler by telegraph, “State by what authority of law you are acting. State fully what violations, if any, took place prior to decision to deport strikers”; however, it is not certain if or when Wheeler received Whitney’s message.10

  For those crammed aboard the train a trip of several hours through the day’s heat ensued—automobiles filled with armed Protective League members driving alongside—until the deportees reached Hermanas, New Mexico, 180 miles away. Stranded without food or water, they were told they would be killed if they attempted to return to Bisbee. The men were eventually given refuge at a U.S. army camp at Columbus, New Mexico.

  The IWW, as it had at Jerome, protested to Washington, Big Bill Haywood terming the Bisbee affair “an outrage,” while denying emphatically “that German money, German influence, or wartime motives are behind the western copper strikes … [they] are simply an effort to get living wages and just working conditions for our miners.”11 An editorial in the New York Times conceded Haywood’s point, but insisted that “if [the IWW’s] passion for mischief is not fomented and paid for by German agents, at any rate its fruits are for German benefit.” Sheriff Wheeler “was on the right track,” the paper noted, to arrest IWW members as vagrants, for the disaffected workers, “tramps and all sorts of yahoos [and] summer roamers,” the Wobblies attracted had become “pilgrims of disturbance” in the West. The editorial did chastise the sheriff for taking the law into his own hands,12 as did President Wilson, who reminded Arizona governor Thomas E. Campbell, “Bisbee had the right to defend itself against violence, not to do violence.”13

  Many Americans were disturbed by the “kidnapping” of the Bisbee workers, organized labor railing the loudest at the prospect that capital had now added forcible deportation to its methods of countering legitimate worker grievances. The IWW threatened a general strike and/or the “retaking” of Bisbee by armed force; it also suggested that the cure for the likes of Sheriff Wheeler and Phelps Dodge’s feudalistic control lay in the nationalization of the copper mines. But so much huffing and puffing was of little avail. Although a federal inquiry into the Bisbee deportation led by Labor Secretary William B. Wilson found the actions of Sheriff Wheeler and the vigilantes “wholly illegal,” and some mining officials and deputies were placed under arrest, a federal court ultimately dismissed the case.14 Indeed, the lesson President Wilson appeared to take from the Bisbee fiasco was that the IWW was treacherous, would potentially hinder war manufacturing, and would need to be closely watched. As for the stranded Bisbee men, most lingered on as guests of the army at Columbus until September, then scattered, only about 6 percent daring to return to their homes in Bisbee.

  Bisbee signaled the beginning of a disheartening season of confrontation for the IWW, as the ruthless nature of the Jerome and Bisbee affairs was soon replicated in distant Butte, Montana, a tough antiunion town that had chased the WFM out in 1914 and where the IWW was active on behalf of striking copper workers of the Metal Mine Workers Union. Bill Haywood called Butte “the city with the copper soul”—a place where “the people … breathed copper, ate copper, wore copper, and were thoroughly saturated with copper.” Work-related disease and injuries were so numerous it was said there were as
many miners in the local cemeteries as there were toiling in the mines.15 The summer of 1917 had gotten off to a particularly gruesome start, when on June 8 an electrical cable that powered underground pumps at the Speculator mine outside Butte broke, filling the lower levels of the mine with smoke and gas, claiming 164 workers’ lives. By mid-July word had arrived of the massive deportation at Bisbee, and nervous Butte strikers appealed to Montana congress-woman Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist and the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives, to safeguard their rights and block any similar action by local mine owners. These efforts were of no avail, for at month’s end the Montana copper bosses, reading closely from the Bisbee play-book, gathered a vigilante force that with the assistance of helpful U.S. soldiers seized and deported Butte’s IWW leaders.

  One of the high-profile targets of the sweep was Frank Little, the by-now legendary Wobbly organizer known to describe himself as “half Indian, half white man, all IWW.” Little had been in the thick of several nasty IWW scrapes out west and was known for putting his body on the line. He had the bruises to show for it, and was walking with the aid of a pair of crutches when he arrived in Butte to aid the strike. He lost no time calling attention to himself, mounting a soapbox and disparaging the war in Europe as capitalist slaughter, while referring to U.S. troops serving there as “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniform.”16

  Late on the night of July 31 six masked men entered Little’s boardinghouse room as he slept, abducted him in his underclothes, and dragged him out to a waiting car. After driving around for a couple of hours and subjecting him to occasional beatings and torture—at one point they pulled him by a rope from the automobile’s rear fender—they arrived at a desolate railroad trestle on the outskirts of town and hanged him from one of the crossties. A note found pinned to his corpse the next day read: “First and Last Warning,” followed by the numbers “3–7–77,” an allusion to the state of Montana’s required dimensions for a grave: three feet wide, seven feet long, and seventy-seven inches deep.17 Among the dead man’s scant personal effects at the boardinghouse friends found a small envelope with some curious residue inside; upon it were written the words “Ashes of Joe Hill.”18

  GIVEN THE COUNTRY’S MOOD, the lynching of Frank Little was horrific but predictable—the murder of an outspoken IWW radical by vigilantes consumed with righteous patriotism. What the Wobblies were beginning to understand as they buried their comrade, however, was that it wasn’t only mobs of angry citizens they had to fear; the federal government also had drawn a bull’s-eye on the IWW.19 Its labor activism at Bisbee, Butte, and other copper mining towns had convinced President Wilson that the IWW intended to use the war to bleed concessions from industry, a threat that would potentially interfere with war manufactures; Wilson decided to order a full investigation of the group to be led by Judge J. Harry Covington, a distinguished law professor and former congressman from Maryland.

  The creation of the Covington inquiry was only one of many steps Washington took in response to the war and the intensified concern about disloyalty at home. In 1917 Congress passed the Espionage Act to criminalize the relating of “false reports or false statements” that had the potential to interfere with the U.S. military, or any acts that aimed to cause insubordination among military personnel or obstruct military enlistment or recruitment. It also banned any interference with war manufacturing. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it a crime to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, the Constitution, or the military, or to “encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of its enemies.” The Immigration Act of 1918, expanding on the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, which had been crafted in response to the murder of President McKinley, decreed that aliens who were anarchists or believed in the overthrow of the federal government or the assassination of government officials could be barred from America, and those already here could be deported. An immigrant’s membership in an anarchist group was sufficient for deportation; there was no requirement he or she be proven guilty of wrongdoing.

  These three acts were so sweeping and so broadly written that numerous cases arose of labor organizers, immigrants, and other individuals being arrested who had done little more than speak, write, or express an interest in the Wobblies, anarchism, or the political situation in Russia. Many were held incommunicado and detained indefinitely, and it often proved impossible to reverse the gears of “justice” once an individual, particularly one not native-born, became ensnared. Another way in which radicals found themselves in the government’s sights was for violation of the Conscription Act, which had become law in May 1917; all aliens were required to register with the draft, and any who had begun naturalization proceedings could be called up for military service.

  Made aware of Judge Covington’s assignment, Big Bill tried a preemptive maneuver—offering the IWW’s full cooperation, including the opening of the group’s files, to the government. Instead, apparently hoping to obtain incriminating information before the Wobblies could cover their tracks, Department of Justice raiders struck on September 5, 1917, invading forty-eight IWW halls across the country and bagging five tons of documents. “The books in which were recorded the transactions of the organization, the literature, the furniture, typewriters, mimeograph machines, pictures from the wall and spittoons from the floor were seized as evidence,” Haywood recalled.20 Three weeks later, on September 28, a federal court in Chicago indicted 165 Wobblies, largely on charges involving violation of the Espionage Act; many were incarcerated at the Cook County jail, some in the very cells once occupied by the martyrs of Haymarket.21

  The issuing of the indictments brought dissension within the IWW into the open when Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, Joe Ettor, and Arturo Giovannitti insisted that their cases be severed from the rest. Flynn contended this was the best means of thwarting the prosecution, since demanding that the government show specific evidence of individual wrongdoing would hinder the kind of guilt-by-association argument used in the Haymarket tribunal and at Ettor and Giovannitti’s trial in Massachusetts. Haywood and other leading Wobblies disagreed; the IWW lacked the funds to combat individual cases and, most important, the organization saw the trial as a matter of conscience in which the accused should stand and fall together. What Haywood was not aware of was that Flynn had written a rather obsequious letter to President Wilson, offering mild apologies for her radical past and dissociating herself from the IWW. She was fortunate that its contents were not then known by others.

  Tensions already existed between Haywood and Flynn stemming from the IWW’s organizing work a few years before in the iron ore mines of the Mesabi Range of northern Minnesota. In 1916 Tresca had been charged there as an accessory to murder in the death of a sheriff’s deputy. Flynn, against Haywood’s wishes, urged four miners also accused in the case to plead guilty and accept a reduced sentence, a move that went against IWW policy and was seen as an expedient to get Tresca, who might have been deported if convicted, out of legal jeopardy. Flynn herself later insisted that her falling-out with Haywood had more to do with her criticism of his handling of the flow of strike and relief monies for Mesabi from the Chicago IWW office. In any event, the move by Flynn and the others to challenge the government by isolating their cases turned out to have been correct, as charges were ultimately dropped against all four.

  On April 1, 1918, the trial of 101 Wobblies commenced in Chicago, while other proceedings against scattered cells of IWW members ensued in Omaha, Wichita, and Sacramento. John Reed rendered a romantic description of the Chicago defendants as those “who believe the wealth of the world belongs to him who creates it … the boys who do the strong work of the world,”22 but the trial judge, veteran jurist Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was unimpressed by the scruffy radicals who filed into his courtroom. Known for his no-nonsense attitude toward activists or moral transgressors, he had helped ban black heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson from the sport
after Johnson’s indictment for violation of the Mann Act, and had sentenced Victor Berger, a Socialist congressman from Wisconsin, to twenty years in prison simply for publishing an antiwar editorial in a Milwaukee newspaper. Reed, perhaps ungenerously, described the judge, who was in his early fifties, as “a wasted man with untidy white hair, an emaciated face in which two burning eyes are set like jewels, parchment skin split by a crack for a mouth; the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead.”23

  While the charges against the Wobblies centered on the Espionage Act, each defendant was accused of over one hundred specific crimes as part of what prosecutors depicted as a substantial IWW conspiracy; these included opposing the draft, urging other IWW members to refuse induction, encouraging insubordination in the army, and taking part in strikes aimed at crippling the war effort. “How we one hundred and one defendants had conspired together to arrange such a conspiracy we never knew,” Richard Brazier, one of the defendants, later said. “For most of us had never met prior to our arrests.”24

  The prosecution was formally led by Charles F. Clyne, the U.S. attorney for northern Illinois, although the actual lead lawyer was Frank K. Nebeker, a veteran legal representative for western mine owners. The IWW defendants had as their lead attorney George Vanderveer, known as the “Counsel for the Damned” for his willingness to defend hard-luck Wobblies in several western courtroom fights. In advance of the trial, Vanderveer tried several times to get the case dismissed, arguing that the arrests and the seizure of evidence violated the First and Fourth amendments, and that the treatment of those detained and even their friends and family who attempted to visit them had been abhorrent. One of the examples most talked about involved a young California woman named Theodora Pollok, who had gone to the Sacramento jail to bail out IWW acquaintances; police immediately placed Pollok herself under arrest, impounded all the cash she’d brought along, then subjected her to a thorough body examination that included a vaginal probe.