by Jay Feldman
The mining strikes started in Butte, Montana. The immediate cause was a fire in the North Butte Mining Company’s Speculator mine that killed 164 miners on June 8. Three days later, between ten thousand and twelve thousand miners walked out. Mine owners refused to negotiate their demands for a six-hour day, a $6 daily wage, better working conditions, union recognition, and an end to the practice of “rustling cards,” a de facto system of blackballing used by the owners to weed out potential “troublemakers,” that is, union members and political undesirables.
In assessing the Montana mining troubles, Wade R. Parks, a Montana county attorney, suggested that the underlying problem was the owners’ intransigence. He told Gregory, “I think that if the employing class of the West would meet the I.W.W.’s and other … employees of theirs half way on a common ground that there would be no general discontent.”37 But in the opinion of John D. Ryan, chairman of the Council of National Defense’s Cooperative Committee on Copper (a negotiating group for management) and an official of Anaconda, the nation’s largest mining company, the trouble stemmed not from depressed wages, extended hours, or inhumane working conditions but from the sinister motives of Wobblies and German agents.
The strike quickly spread to Arizona, whose four mining districts produced 28 percent of the nation’s copper. By the first week of July, twenty-five thousand men were off the job, effectively shutting down the state’s copper mines. The owners were obdurate. “Wrapping themselves in the American flag,” as the IWW historian Dubofsky has written, “the employers declared total war in defense of the status quo.”38
Predictably, the press took the side of the owners and attacked the Wobblies. “Break the I.W.W. Now,” demanded a headline in The Independent. The Wall Street Journal likened the Wobblies to venomous snakes, saying, “Copperheads … are in the copper mines and lumber camps and threaten to invade other fields. Instead of waiting to see if their bite is poisonous, the heel of the Government should stamp them at once.” The New York Times was convinced that “if the whole gang could be deported from the United States, the United States would be greatly improved.”39
Without a shred of evidence, the IWW was widely accused of being in the service of the kaiser and being backed by German money. Senator Charles Thomas of Colorado charged that “a conspiracy directed by German agents to work through the Industrial Workers of the World is crippling … industries in the West.”40 Bill Haywood angrily denied such rumors, stating, “I want to deny emphatically that German money, German influence, or war-time motives are behind the Western copper strikes … It is not German influence, but simply an effort to get living wages and just working conditions for our miners that is behind the strikes.”41
While the copper strikes were in full swing, workers in the timber industry of Washington and Idaho were also walking out, shutting down 75 percent of the industry, in what has been called “the most spectacular and widespread lumber strike ever to occur in the United States.”42 Again, with no real evidence, employers and the press made wild and hysterical accusations of violence on the part of Wobblies, as mine owners and lumbermen alike demanded that the federal government send in troops to quell the work stoppages.
Many contemporary reports by government agents, however, mentioned the peaceful nature of the strikes. A War Department observer reported “no violence or disorder” in the Bisbee, Arizona, copper strike;43 and in reference to the Butte situation, the U.S. attorney and future senator Burton K. Wheeler told Gregory, “The strike is being conducted … in a manner heretofore unheard of in mining regions. No violence or disorder is observed or been reported.”44 A Justice Department report found no “disorder or disturbance or undue activity whatsoever on the part of the I.W.W.” in Missoula.45
Frightened by exaggerated reports in the press, local citizens in many communities beset with labor unrest decided to take matters into their own hands. In Jerome, Arizona, mine owners and other businessmen formed the Jerome Loyalty League and had sixty-seven Wobblies rounded up on July 10. They were loaded into cattle cars and shipped into California, where they were met at the border by armed citizens, who forced the cattle cars back across the state line. The following day, most of the men were apprehended by Home Guards in Kingman, Arizona, and released after promising to leave the area.
The tactic spread. On July 12, police in Lincoln, Nebraska, met a freight train with fifty Wobblies fresh from the Kansas harvest fields and prevented them from getting off the train. The same day, in nearby Fairbury, thirty Wobblies were put on a freight train and banished from the town.
Nothing, however, compared to the roundup that took place in Bisbee, where the IWW-affiliated Metal Mine Workers’ Industrial Union had been conducting a peaceful strike since June 27. At the beginning of the strike, the former Rough Rider and Cochise County sheriff Harry Wheeler telegraphed Arizona’s governor, Thomas Campbell, to say, “The I.W.W. strike here is most serious and I anticipate great property loss and bloodshed. Majority strikers seem foreign. The whole thing appears pro-German and anti-American. I earnestly request you use your influence to have United States troops sent here to take charge of the situation.”46 Campbell, in turn, requested federal troops, and the secretary of war sent a high-ranking Army officer to investigate. On June 30 and July 2, the officer reported that there was no need or reason to send soldiers, an assessment that was confirmed by others.
Frustrated by the government’s response, the Citizens’ Protective League, made up of businessmen, and the Workmen’s Loyalty League, composed of non-striking miners, met in secret on the night of July 11 and planned a mass deportation to be carried out under Wheeler’s direction.†
They agreed to censor interstate telephone and telegraph lines in order to prevent news of the deportation from getting out and intentionally neglected to inform their own legal advisers, the Arizona U.S. attorney, or other state and county law officers of their plan.
At dawn on July 12, Wheeler and his deputies, armed with rifles, revolvers, and clubs and wearing white armbands to distinguish them from their victims, began their Wobbly hunt. By 6:30 a.m., the posse had collected about twelve hundred people in Bisbee and nearby Lowell. Along with Wobblies, the sweep had netted IWW sympathizers—including three women—and anyone who could not adequately explain his reasons for being in Bisbee. Among those snared were businessmen, property owners, and Liberty Bond subscribers. One member of the Citizens’ Protective League and one miner were killed during the roundup.
According to one detainee’s account, his group was herded by men in an automobile, who trained a machine gun on their captives. The prisoners were marched to a baseball field, where they were held under the broiling desert sun for several hours, then moved at bayonet point and gunpoint onto a freight train of about two dozen cattle cars and boxcars provided by the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad. A little after noon, the train pulled out, bound for Columbus, New Mexico, with scant provisions of bread, crackers, and water. There were armed guards on top of each car, and the train was shadowed for miles by gunmen in automobiles.
At Columbus, the townspeople refused to let the train discharge its passengers, so it returned to the small town of Hermanas, where they were unceremoniously dropped off and left to fend for themselves. After two days without food, the refugees were escorted by soldiers to an Army camp in Columbus; there the government provided for them for two months, until the middle of September.
The Arizona State Federation of Labor demanded that President Wilson take immediate action in returning the miners to their homes, asking, “Are we to assume that Phelps Dodge interests are superior to the principles of democracy?” Wilson took umbrage at the implication, considering it “unjust and offensive.”47 Rather than condemning the vigilante deportations in a tough and decisive manner, Wilson wired his tepid displeasure to Governor Campbell. “May I not respectfully urge the great danger of citizens taking the law into their own hands, as your report indicates their having done,” wrote the president. “I
look upon such action with grave apprehension. A very serious responsibility is assumed when such precedents are set.”48
Unruffled by the president’s criticism, Sheriff Wheeler defiantly told the attorney general of Arizona that if he and his posse were “guilty of taking the law into our own hands, I can only cite to you the Universal Law that necessity makes … I would repeat the operation any time I find my own people endangered by a mob composed of eighty percent aliens and enemies of the Government.”49 Not even the presence of federal troops, sent in to maintain order after the deportations, could intimidate Wheeler, as he maintained a vigilante government in Bisbee for the next three months, in flagrant defiance of the law.
The mainstream press roundly praised Wheeler’s actions in the deportations. Although, said The New York Times, “a Sheriff who makes his own law is on dangerous and indefensible ground … [t]he Sheriff of Bisbee was on the right track.” The Los Angeles Times stated that “the citizens of Cochise county, Arizona, have written a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy. In these days America cannot afford to trifle with rioters … If there ever was a case where the doubtful expedient of taking the law into the hands of those not lawfully authorized to execute it, this is one.”50
Wheeler had contended, and in this he was undoubtedly acting as the mouthpiece of the mine owners: “This is no labor trouble. We are sure of that; but it is a direct attempt to embarrass the government of the United States.”51 However, the future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who served as legal counsel to the presidential commission on Bisbee, told Congress that there was a “total want of justification on the part of those who participated in the deportations … It is easy to disregard economic abuses, to insist on the exercise of autocratic power by raising the false cry of ‘disloyalty.’ ”52
The deportations were clearly nothing more than a strikebreaking tactic, cloaked in the disguise of patriotic fervor and tacitly sanctioned by the state. Despite the known identity of the perpetrators, and the commission’s finding that “the deportation was wholly illegal and without authority in law, either State or Federal,” nobody was ever punished for the outrage.53
As the government looked the other way, depredations against Wobblies continued, the most grievous being the murder of Frank Little by a masked and armed vigilante mob in Butte during the early morning hours of August 1. Small, frail, blind in one eye, and walking on crutches as a result of an earlier beating, Little, a thirty-eight-year-old half Cherokee, was a member of the IWW’s General Executive Board and a widely traveled organizer whose radical speeches had gained him a fair degree of notoriety.
He arrived in Butte on July 19, direct from the Arizona strikes, and immediately earned the enmity of mine owners, the local press, law-enforcement officials, and the Pinkerton detectives who had been called in to break the strike. After delivering at least two inflammatory talks to thousands of strikers, Little was abducted from his rooming house in the middle of the night, clad only in his underwear. He was tied to the rear bumper of a car and dragged to a railroad bridge outside town, where he was beaten and tortured, then hanged to death from the trestle. The murderers left a note pinned to his underwear that said, “Others Take Notice. First and Last Warning.”54
Frank Little’s murder was never solved. In its aftermath, federal troops were sent to Butte, as cries now went up demanding that the government squash the IWW. “The Federal authorities should make short work of these treasonable conspirators against the United States,” said an August 4 New York Times editorial. The Independent wrote, “It is time for the American public to take them in hand, put them behind the bars and break their organization.”55
President Wilson apparently agreed and appointed the District of Columbia federal judge J. Harry Covington to investigate the IWW with a view toward prosecution. Bill Haywood immediately invited Covington to Wobbly headquarters in Chicago to examine the union’s books and papers, offering him “all the assistance possible in the inquiry.”56 Covington ignored the offer, for there was a bigger plan in the works. “Under the direction of the Attorney General something quite effective is under way with respect to the I.W.W. situation,” Assistant Attorney General William C. Fitts told Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico. “I do not think you or any of your western friends will be disappointed if the results which we hope to obtain are achieved.”57
It had been a devastating summer for minority voices. Writing about the events of July 1917—which included the trial of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the shuttering of the Socialist press, and the Bisbee deportations—John Reed said, “In America the month just past has been the blackest month for freemen our generation has known. With a sort of hideous apathy the country has acquiesced in a regime of judicial tyranny, bureaucratic suppression and industrial barbarism.”58
But the event of July 1917 that would have the most serious long-term consequences was one that Reed had no way of knowing about. On the twenty-sixth day of the month, a young law-school graduate and lifelong District of Columbia resident named John Edgar Hoover went to work for the Department of Justice. Hoover, who had been employed as a cataloger at the Library of Congress, was an ambitious and gifted bureaucrat with an innately conservative nature and a decided penchant for power. Within a year and a half, he would make his presence felt in the Justice Department, and over the next half century he would become the most adroit expert in the practices of secret government and surveillance of citizens that the United States has ever known.
*Whatever Wilson’s reservations or misgivings may have been about Burleson’s assault on the dissident press, the campaign extended executive branch power, which was a priority item on Wilson’s own agenda and therefore almost certainly not disagreeable to him.
†According to a presidential commission that later investigated the Bisbee deportations, the rationalization for the expulsions was that the strikers were contemplating violence, but in reality, the commission found, this pretext had “no justification” (Report on the Bisbee Deportations, p. 5).
CHAPTER 4
A Peculiar Sort of Mental Hysteria
By mid-August 1917, it was all-out war on the IWW. In contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricted the use of the Army for law enforcement, the War Department sent federal troops to occupy the mining towns of Arizona and Montana, as well as the timber regions of the Pacific Northwest, where lumber industry production continued to be seriously curtailed by union activity. Working with local businessmen, soldiers broke up IWW picket lines and demonstrations, established unauthorized martial law, conducted illegal searches and seizures, and arrested Wobblies, 90 percent of whom were U.S. citizens. In Seattle, federal, state, and city officials teamed with Army officers to circumvent the problem of habeas corpus: by having the military commander take charge of any detainees being held on shaky legal grounds, they were able to ignore any habeas corpus petitions for those individuals. In commenting on this arrangement, the U.S. attorney for Seattle conceded that “the troop commanders [may] have been urged to extend their authority beyond what was intended, but the plan meets with public approval.”1
The Labor Department was also moving against the IWW. On July 21, the Idaho immigrant inspector W. J. McConnell wrote to Anthony Caminetti, the commissioner general of immigration (the Bureau of Immigration was part of the Labor Department), to ask whether alien Wobblies could be deported under the new Immigration Act that had taken effect on May 1.2 In addition to imposing a literacy requirement on new immigrants over sixteen years of age, the law excluded various categories of undesirables, including the mentally retarded, the insane, alcoholics, paupers, vagrants, tuberculars, polygamists, and “anarchists, or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States.”3 Moreover, the statute stipulated that any alien who preached anarchy or the overthrow of the government could be taken into custody and deported. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the law was its gu
ilt-by-association provision, which provided that anybody in any way affiliated with an organization that believed in anarchism could be excluded from the United States.
After McConnell’s letter, Caminetti—citing the old canard about the IWW’s being under “German influence and possibly backed with German funds”—urged Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post to immediately undertake a vigorous campaign against alien leaders among the Wobblies.4
It was quickly recognized that while court proceedings against the Wobblies could be expensive, time-consuming, and of dubious outcome, deportation presented a quick and efficient solution to the IWW problem. The idea was to target a few select leaders and thereby produce a chilling effect on the union.
Labor Secretary William B. Wilson instructed Caminetti to obtain various IWW publications and determine if the plan suggested by McConnell was feasible. After reading an assortment of the organization’s literature, Caminetti concluded that the Wobblies’ willingness to “combat organized government, or the representatives thereof, is hinted at,” and he endorsed McConnell’s scheme to arrest and deport some of the leaders.5
While the War and Labor departments were carrying on their operations, the Justice Department opened a third front of attack against the IWW. On July 16, even before President Wilson authorized Judge Covington’s investigation of the union, Attorney General Gregory had instructed all U.S. attorneys to undertake “an extraordinary effort … to ascertain the future plans of all Wobblies, as well as the names, descriptions, and history of the IWW’s leaders, the sources of its income, the nature of its expenses, copies of all IWW publications, and any data that might possibly incriminate the Wobblies.”6 Gregory also suggested that any Wobblies who were German aliens and had violated the Espionage Act should be apprehended so that warrants for their detention could be prepared.