I first visited the American Mountain West in 1999. I fell in love with the region, for reasons which – as a lifelong mountaineer – totally surprised me. The Wasatch Range are a fine set of mountains, but having seen other and grander areas of the Rocky Mountains – especially the Canadian Rockies – this was not the aspect of the landscape which made the most impact on me.
Once I had seen the landforms of southern Utah, the word desert acquired a new meaning to someone who had previously identified it with endless sand hills. I have returned to the South-West seven times over the subsequent years, each time revisiting the deserts of the Colorado Plateau, expanding my explorations from Utah to New Mexico, Arizona and to southern Colorado, each time visiting new locations and never losing my sense of wonder.
I began to read the writers of the South-West hitherto unknown to me, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and others and started to appreciate the artists of the region such as Georgia O’Keeffe. These trips also initiated an appreciation of the historical layers of the South-West, gradually revealing themselves like the geologically layered and exposed landscape itself. I found myself reading about the Anasazi, the Pueblo Indians, the Spaniards, the Native Americans, the Mormon settlers, the cowboys, and searching out their built heritages as well as discovering their histories. But it was only on my fifth visit to the South-West that I became familiar with the remains of a whole strata of history that appeared to have been strip-mined out of the regional collective consciousness: that of the labour movement.
Towards the end of my fourth visit I had seen in a bookshop David R Berman’s Radicalism in the Mountain West 1890-1920 (University of Colorado Press, 2007). After a brief flick through it, I purchased it in the realisation that I had hit a rich mine of information on an aspect of the history of the South-West that I had seen no reference to previously, in any of the books I had read or at any of the historical sites I had visited. And one that, given my own political predelictions, was of particular interest.
To the Anasazi, the Pueblo Indian, the Apache, the Cowboy and the Mormon as iconic archetypes of the American West, was now added that of the Miner. Though the militant, class-conscious miner I read about in Berman’s work had all but disappeared from the South-West – almost as totally as had the Anasazi beforehand – the book became a gazetteer to the historical landscape of my more recent travels, and was something I had wished I had possessed on my previous ones. The book covers the whole of the Mountain West from Arizona in the south to Montana in the north, but the limitations of my pilgrimage so far mean that it is mainly the South-West, Utah and its southern neighbour Arizona, which Berman has illuminated for me.
This meant taking a different trail for this particular odyssey, starting further south in Arizona, and working my way northwards to Salt Lake City, weaving my way along a thread of mining locations and industrial conflicts. (I also visited several other sites on this trip, many associated with the Native American tradition, but have dealt with the impressions they created in another chapter). This necessitated arriving in Phoenix, Arizona. People often criticise Salt Lake City as antiseptic and austere, but it has a functioning city centre and a real historical identity – whether you like that identity or not. Phoenix seemed to have a centre that consisted of huge motorway intersections, and beyond that lay endless gated communities which could have been models for Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. After a night there I headed south, swung past Tucson, and made for the Mexican border.
One of the delights – for a European – of travelling the South-West is that one moves from town to town, in an out of that deep dichotomy which lies at the heart of the American body politic. One settlement seems to contain a collection of conservative, rednecks stuck in an almost 1950s time warp, whilst the next (always smaller) town is fill of liberal hippy counter-cultural dropouts. I often feel that – unsuspected by both sets of people – as much unites them as divides them, as both are wedded to a fundamental belief in American individualism, an individualism which is not so dominant a part of the European consciousness. Arizona is a very conservative place, predominantly right-wing Republican and most of the places I passed through on the way south looked that way, and I was not tempted to make a stop-over. Then I got to Douglas.
I stayed in the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, a town where once there had been a large Phelps Dodge copper smelter. Douglas is a sad place now, the smelter long gone, and it appears (at least its downtown does) to be largely inhabited by poor Hispanics. Mexico was at the end of the street, near a semi-militarised frontier post which crossed into Agua Prieta. The barman in the Gadsden Hotel, drying glasses, called Douglas ‘a place where dreams come to die’. But it had not always been so, and the very faded glories of the hotel told of once-living dreams. Established in 1907 when the town was booming, its lobby is one of the most opulent you are ever likely to see. A white Italian marble staircase, with gold-leafed pillars frames a 42-ft wide Tiffany glass mural of the South-West. A chip in one of the stairs is put down to one of the hooves of Pancho Villa’s horse as he rode it up the stairs on his failed invasion of the US in 1917. Five years before that, Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party of America had got 13% of the US presidential vote in Arizona, and a much higher share in places like Douglas. Then Arizona was a radical state, where socialist, trade unionists and left-leaning Democrats were very influential.
The hotel was quiet; few people came to Douglas now, it appeared. Despite the hotel’s historic character and opulence with put it on the National Historic Monument register, it was cheap, $30 for a room. The barman argued against heading for Agua Prieta, just for the purpose of being able to say I’d been to Mexico, telling me, ‘Its wild over there, and anyway, it’s just like Mexico here in Douglas anyway.’
This was confirmed on a brief walkabout before heading back to the hotel to eat. In downtown Douglas almost all of the visible population were Hispanics, tending cheap market stalls, running cheap restaurants, idling and chatting. The Gadsen Hotel might have been faded, but it was still in better condition of any other building I took note of. Many such in the vernacular wood and brick construction had a charm which decay and lack of maintenance conspired to hide, without totally succeeding. The old cinema, the newspaper office, were closed and boarded up. A quarter of an hour did Douglas, and a quarter of the same hour did for what the barman could produce for me in the way of food back in the hotel. I took my drink and went to sit in the wonderful lobby, getting pleasantly inebriated and thinking about Pancho Villa, Eugene Debs … and dreaming. Next day I moved on to Bisbee, encouraged rather than put off by the Douglas barman’s recommendation to avoid a place he described as ‘Full of hippies and homosexuals.’
As I entered Bisbee I saw the remains of the old copper mine, the redundant open-cast workings looking like a man-made miniature Grand Canyon. I spent a couple of nights in the Copper Queen Hotel, built, as I later discovered, just as everything else was in this company town, by the Phelps Dodge Copper Company. Bisbee, contra Douglas, was clearly a place where people still came to live their dreams, those counter-cultural dreams which are yet strong in the United States but, since the 1960s, have almost totally vanished from Europe. By the second day however I didn’t see the picturesque, alternative town of food co-ops and book collectives, surviving largely on craft and cultural tourism, which I had entered the day before. But, re-reading Berman’s book, I saw Bisbee as it formerly was, a grim, polluted copper town, a company town of 25,000 people in 1910, deeply divided between the miners housed in the shacks sliding downhill and the mansions of the company bosses, and their client middle class. The colourful Love and Peace cabins on the hillsides, adorned with paintings and flowers had formerly been the overcrowded, insanitary hovels of the copper miners.
Bisbee, unlike Douglas, is on the tourist trail, the counter-cultural aspirations of the drop-out inhabitants depending largely on the spending power of the tourist clientele who pass through. As a result the Copper Queen Hotel was much busier and in much better repair than the Gadsen. And much more expensive. Built in 1902 when Bisbee was the largest settlement in the USA between St Louis and San Francisco, the hotel was constructed in an Italianate style, rather than the Western vernacular of the Gadsen. The bar had an almost century-old and virtually lifesize portrait of a naked Lillie Langtry on the wall, in the style of Goya’s Maia. Though she never made it this far, Lillie appears to have been the main pin-up girl of cowboys and miners in much of the West around 1900 – she even has a town in west Texas named after her.
In 1906 the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) led a strike at the Copper Queen Mine which was defeated by firing the strikers and employing blackleg labour. Though unionisation was crushed then, a decade later another attempt to organise the mine and improve working conditions was made by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies). They banned alcohol during the strike and disarmed all their members to demonstrate their peaceable intentions, but this was of no avail. The local sheriff deputised hundreds of armed men – including some of the strike -breakers – and in a series of raids arrested between 1000 and 2000 (estimates vary), escorting them under armed guard to the railway station and deporting them to the New Mexico desert where they were dumped and left without food and water. No one was held to account for this act of mass kidnapping, which broke the strike.
Was anything left of this era in people’s minds? I went to the Copper Queen Mine, a part of which, the pre-1920 deep mine, is today open as a Heritage Centre and was shown round by a couple of the retired miners who had stayed on to establish the museum. Interestingly they were of Mexican descent and their ancestors had possibly been brought here after the 1917 strike to replace the sacked Wobblies. They were nevertheless strong union men and told me that when the mine closed in the 1970s the unionised segment of the mine workers were laid off and the non-union workers offered work elsewhere. Refusing to give up the union, these two, along with some others, took redundancy and stayed in Bisbee.
One thing that weakened trades unionism in the United States was that employers might keep wages low but often provided social benefits, like health provision, that in Europe were generally provided by the state. Bisbee had had its company hospital (admittedly paid for partly by deductions from miners’ wages) but it struck me further that the miners at the Copper Queen also had showers from the 1920s. British coal miners had to wait till 1945 and the nationalisation of the mines before they had similar pithead washing facilities.
Walking through the town that evening and the next morning I admired the former miners’ shacks, now brightly painted and with well-tended gardens, many of them advertising that their occupants were engaged in artisanal work in jewellery and other crafts. Pastiche seemed to suit Bisbee. In the Copper Queen we had Lillie Langtry as Maia, and on a wall uptown was a large peace mural, painted in obvious homage to and in imitation of Picasso. I was taking a photograph when one of the town’s more recent residents passed and engaged me in conversation. I told him I was on the miners’ trail, and he agreed that 100 years ago Ariziona had been a pretty radical place.
‘But not now,’ he added, ‘Arizona was Goldwater country, its Bush country now – though there were only about a dozen people in Bisbee voted for him last time round.’
I commented that whilst I admired and was attracted to the counter-cultural aspects of Bisbee, I felt the people there were dropping out of engagement with wider American society, effectively practising a modern form of monasticism. He smiled, ‘Well, you might think that coming from Europe, but in America, at least in Arizona, were just glad there’s somewhere to drop out to.’
I drove northwards next morning though the desert country of southern Arizona. This was pleasing on the eyes, but to mine it lacked the dramatic qualities and the great contrasts of the Utah desert. The towns – Benson, Willcox, Safford, looked pretty uninspiring too. I stopped at Clifton, where the ‘company men’ from Bisbee had got jobs at the new open-cast copper mine. I could not help feeling that those left behind at Bisbee had been lucky and could only agree with my Lonely Planet guide that Clifton ‘is one of the most decrepit towns in Arizona’, much of it boarded up. The massive Phelps-Dodge mine, over two-miles long, swallowed up the original town of Morenci, where in 1915 the Western Federation of Miners called out 5,000 mainly Hispanic miners for union recognition and equal wages with white miners.
That this strike was entirely peaceful and a partial success was due to the unique intervention in it by Governor Hunt of Arizona, a left-leaning Democrat who had the backing of many socialists and trade-union members in Arizona in his campaigns for office. Hunt ordered in the National Guard to Clifton – but to protect the strikers from strike-breakers and vigilantes whom he correctly suspected of being much more liable to initiate violence. Hunt was determined to avoid a repeat of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in Colorado, when state troopers killed 13 women and children by torching, and then firing into, the striking miners’ camp. In the dozens of armed interventions in industrial disputes cited by Berman, by state and federal troops, local militia, deputised vigilantes and from outright mob action, this is the only occasion where force was used in favour of, and not against, strikers. And it was virtually the only conflict free from violence.
I did not linger long in Clifton, and heading for Jerome, a further location of one of my labour history sites, I wondered whether it would be another Clifton or another Bisbee. Situated in what must be one of the most beautiful belvederes in the world, looking northwards across Arizona towards Humphrey’s Peak, it was neither. Clarkdale (it didn’t even have an entry in my guide book and didn’t look like it merited one) was where the United Verde Copper Company Smelter lay, and above it in the hills was Jerome, where the copper mine itself had been located. At its height the town of Jerome had a population of 20,000 but the mine closed long before that in Bisbee – way back in the 1950s – and the population fell to about 500, effectively making the place a ghost town.
Of what is left of the town (the company destroyed or moved away many of the houses) about one-third is virtually ruined, one-third boarded up and one-third restored. It is a fabulous place, less gentrified than Bisbee, and more authentically counter-cultural. I stayed in the Surgeon’s House, a San Francisco-Spanish style villa B&B that was a world away from the tiny miners’ shacks formerly composing the town, and which slithered downhill below it. United Verde boasted that at one point it was making $1million a day from this mine. But in 1917 when the miners – organised again by the IWW – demanded a share in this wealth the response was the predictable one. Sackings, deportations (though on a lesser scale than in Bisbee), the importation of strike-breakers and the crushing of the movement. The local museum, a rather amateurish affair, made no mention of labour disputes in its account of mining history, it was just a collection of knick-knack memorabilia. Half-a-mile outside town the Gold King Mine Ghost Town Museum consisted of a further accumulation of detritus and artefacts, standing exactly as they were when abandoned half-a-century ago. It exuded a decayed Western charm, but without any real attempt at instruction. I thought to myself, if this were an Anasazi site … apparently there is only one museum of labour history in the entire USA, in Matewan in Appalachia.
The context of these labour disputes in Arizona is interesting. As well as being a period of growing union organisation, it was also the peak success time for the American Socialist Party led by Eugene Debs. When he had stood for president in 1912 Debs polled over 900,000 votes – about 6% of the national total. But in the Mountain West this percentage was much higher; in Arizona it was over 13%, and even in supposedly ultra-conservative Utah, it was 8% (every 12th voter). In the mining areas support for socialism was greater still. Utah did not have the level of labour conflict that other mountains states such as Arizona, Montana and Colorado experienced, but the state produced in ‘Big Bill’ Haywood one of the leaders of union-socialist militancy. Not a household name in Utah, Haywood is however buried in the Kremlin Wall, in Moscow, where he died in 1928.
Haywood was not a Mormon, his father being a Pony Express rider based in Salt Lake City who died when his son was three. At 11 years old Haywood was employed in the mines, and after a period as a cowboy, worked at various mining locations in the Mountain West. It was not however until the Colorado Labour Wars of 1902-3, when 33 miners were gunned down by police and state troopers, that Haywood was politicised and joined the WFM, though he defected to the more radical IWW in 1904. In 1907 an attempt was made to frame Haywood and others for the murder of former Idaho State Governor Frank Steuenberg, killed by a bomb in retaliation for his role in murdering striking workers. Haywood and others were kidnapped in Colorado and dragged over the state line into Idaho illegally to face trial; an attempt to get a writ of habeus corpus from the US Supreme Court failed. The prosecution was such a farrago of falsehoods that the trial eventually collapsed.
Haywood played a big role in the successful IWW-led Lawrence Textile Strike in Massachusetts, where textile girls gave the world the slogan, We want bread, and roses too.’ In 1912 he joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA), but like thousands of IWW members, was expelled in 1913 for his Wobbly radicalism and espousal of ‘direct action’. When the USA entered WWI in 1917, 101 members of the IWW were arrested under the Espionage Act and tried for their opposition to the war. Fifteen, including Haywood, were sentenced to 20 years in jail. Released on bail pending appeal in 1921, he emigrated to Soviet Russia. But I digress from my travelogue …
I stayed a few days in Jerome, anyone not doing so would have to be mad. To me it seemed less touristic than Bisbee and to have more of a real community feel about it. Browsing the second-hand clothes and bookshops run by ageing peacenik hippies, and eating in the organic café run by a couple of gay men, one could hardly feel that you were in Goldwater Country. I left Jerome with reluctance promising to myself that I would be back. A long drive then took me north past Flagstaff through the lands of the Navajo Nation and then on to the now familiar region of south-east Utah, past Mexican Hat, Monticello and Moab – though without halting this time. I had however a couple of stops to make between Moab and Salt Lake City, in an area I had driven through before without stopping.
No one would claim that Carbon County is the most scenic part of Utah, and a century ago when it was a wide-open, coal-mining frontier, it would probably have been even grittier than it remains today. This was still Wild West country then. Butch Cassidy and his gang were carrying out armed robberies here in the 1890s, the most notorious being that of the Castle Gate Pleasant Valley Coal Company in 1897. In 1896 the Utah legislature had enacted the eight-hour day in the mines, though safety conditions remained poor. In 1900 an explosion at Scofield in Carbon County killed 200 coal miners (200 of the total of 1500 killed in US mines that year alone) and this led to the start of attempts to unionise the miners, mainly Italians, Greeks and southern Slavs. Carbon County was at this time unique in Utah in that its population was almost entirely non-Mormon, a complex mixture of almost 30 ethic groupings.
In 1903-4 several thousand coal miners in Carbon County, mainly Italians, struck for recognition of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), better wages and improved safety measures. One of the union organisers in this strike was the redoubtable Mother Jones, a septuagenarian who had been a union and socialist militant most of her life, and who arrived in Carbon County to aid the struggle, staying in the town of Helper. The local health authorities claimed she had been in contact with a smallpox victim and quarantined her for the strike’s duration. The workers were evicted from their company homes, and lived in a city of tents for the duration of the strike – and then some of their leaders were jailed for vagrancy, having no fixed abode. Finally deputised armed guards employed by the Utah Fuel Company, and under the protective eye of the state troopers sent in by the governor, destroyed the miners’ camp and arrested many of the strikers, dragging them to jail in Price, and breaking the struggle. In a footnote to this conflict, 100 armed strikers held off a posse sent to arrest Mother Jones for breaking quarantine, and allowed her to escape. There were further bitter strikes in 1922 – met with vigilantes armed with gas bombs and guns – and then again in 1933 before the UMWA finally gained recognition in Carbon County.
British coal-mining towns are now sad places. This is because in almost all of them the mines have closed, leaving unemployment, drugs and dereliction in former proud and self-reliant communities. American mining towns, or at least the ones I have seen in Appalachia and in the South-West, are sad places too – yet in many of them, the mines are still operating. The level of dereliction in the infrastructure, the poor quality of the housing, the abandoned vehicles littering the settlements and the poverty-shopping available would make you think that in Carbon County the settlements were ghost mining towns when they are not. Helper ‘has fallen on hard times, and many of its historic turn of the century buildings are boarded up and for sale’ said my guidebook. Actually the housing in Helper is better than in many South-West mining towns I have visited, more substantial and with fewer trailers and shacks. But the main street – apart from, as usual, the local and national government buildings such as the Post Office with its magnificent A Typical Western Town New Deal mural, is like that of a ghost town. The vast majority of the buildings are unoccupied and derelict, from the several former hotels to the local cinema, the Strand. This former dream place looks, with its non-functioning neon lights, as if it might have been a classy joint in its day. When that might have been can be gauged from the last picture show advertised – The 39 Steps.
Yet, Helper’s Main Street is a National Historic District.
But again, if you scratch beneath the surface you can find that there are many positive aspects to life in places that might indicate otherwise. Located in the former Helper Hotel (long-closed, since no one comes to Helper anymore) is the Western Mining and Railroad Museum. The railway still runs through Helper, mainly carrying coal to power stations, and the ‘helper’ engines which moved the heavy loads up steep gradients gave – in that literalism so common in US placenames – the town its appellation. This museum clearly functions more as a community project and memory bank than a tourist attraction, since tourists don’t come here. There is nowhere to stay if they did. Though the museum is obviously underfunded in its fabric and its ability to mount displays, a community which can produce such a fine presentation of its heritage has life in it yet, despite its population declining from over 6000 in the 1950s to 2000 today. Many of the townsfolk are retired miners and indeed in Carbon County as a whole, income today from pensions and miners’ compensation litigation is greater than that from wages.
Having seen so many local museums and heritage sites in the US that were simply nostalgia trips or collections of antiquarian artefacts I was prepared to be disappointed. I was not. The displays deal with the work of the miners and their social organisations in this multi-cultural and predominantly non-Mormon area, extremely well. The Company Store room shows the low-quality high-cost goods miners were forced to buy as they were paid in company ‘scrip’ (ie the truck system – illegal in Britain long before 1900), a practice that amazingly carried on here until the 1920s, ensuring that miners became indebted to the coal companies and could not leave their employment. A video presentation covers the Scofield mining disaster, and there have been so many here that they actually have a Disasters’ Room – another 170 miners were killed in the Castle Gate explosion of 1924. There is a further room dedicated to the UMWA and the history of its struggles in the area. The delightful centerpiece of this display is a multi-coloured patchwork quilt commemorating 100 years of the union, which was made by miners’ wives in Decker, Wyoming in 1990. It was raffled, won by the Carbon County UMWA local branch, and donated to the museum. It is a unique and wonderful piece of working-class material culture, commemorating various episodes and characters from the UMWA’s history, and appropriately one panel honours Mother Jones, ‘The Miners’ Angel’. There are also some fine Works Project Administration artist paintings from the Depression years of local scenes from landscapes to images of mining life.
I asked the museum attendant if there was still mining here and if they still had the union. He told me there were still about 2500 coal miners in Carbon Country at half-a-dozen mines, all deep ones unlike the open-cast mines in Wyoming, and therefore more expensive to operate.
‘But the coal is very low sulphur and a lot is shipped east to burn in power stations for pollution control reasons.’ He explained. And yes, they’ve still got the union, took too much trouble to get it to give up on it now. We had Mother Jones here, you know?’
I told him I knew, and he smiled, surprised and seeming gratified.
I thought I had seen everything as I drove north out of Carbon County, but I had not seen Eureka. This next stage of my journey there took me to more new territory, south of Utah Lake and into the Tintic Mountains to the west. Even before the Carbon County strikes of a century ago, the state of Utah had seen one of the earliest labour conflicts in the entire region, in the mining town of Eureka in 1893. The mine owners, who were prominent LDS members cut wages and provoked a strike, which was led by the Knights of Labour. The strikers were mainly immigrants such as Finns, Italians, Serbs and Greeks, and the strike was broken by bringing in non-union labour, many of whom were Mormons. In the aftermath of the strike, the SPA gradually built up its organisation, and in 1907 and 1911 Andrew Mitchell, a non-practising Mormon carpenter, was elected as SPA mayor of the town of 3500 inhabitants, the SPA taking full control of the town council of Eureka in 1912. They new administration installed a sewage system, paved the roads – and paid union rates for city council employees. Gambling was banned, alcohol sales controlled – and a Pinkerton detective working for the mining company was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon and fined $75.
Mining clearly carries on in the hills around Eureka, as witnessed by the large numbers of earth-moving machines in evidence and the convoys of trucks on the road. But Eureka is now a near-ghost town whose Mining Museum was closed the day I visited, as was its City Hall – and it appeared, everything else, even the Company Store. It was, without a doubt, one of the saddest and most run-down places I had ever seen in my life. There seemed no one about, no one to talk to, so I drove on. I had a long way to go. Out of curiosity I wanted to drive across the Great Basin – where I had never been – through 200 miles of desert and mountains – and to visit Ely in Nevada, where I had read of other miners’ struggles a century ago. It was not so much Ely’s industrial conflicts which drew me, the strikes in 1919 and 1922 followed the usual pattern of repression and defeat, but the fact that I had heard that the town’s industrial and social history had been commemorated in a series of wall murals in the town and I wanted to see what that iconography represented.
Like many Nevada towns Ely today depends on gambling, as was obvious when I checked in at the ultra-cheap Hotel Nevada where the owners probably expected I would lose lots more cash on the gaming machines than my room charge amounted to. The place had a certain horrible fascination, Americana kitch at its best and worst – and if it had been good enough for Ingrid Bergman, as it claimed it had been, it would do me. Actually it was clean and the food was decent and cheap. It was partly patronised by older working-class American couples for whom this was an affordable holiday and partly by large groups of fierce-looking tattooed bikers with bandoliers, who were surprisingly well-behaved. Ely developed late as a copper-mining town, and gambling has not filled the gap in the decline of the mining industry as is seen by the number of vacant buildings, both domestic and commercial, in the town. The murals themselves which I had come to see, spread around the town – often on empty buildings – were interesting and many showed various workers at their labours in the mines and elsewhere. But the leaflet I picked up said nothing about industrial struggles, only about the struggle of the immigrants to integrate into American society and live the American dream.
One mural showed workers at the Old Liberty Mine, which was located just outside of Ely at a place called Old Ruth. The New Liberty Mine obliterated Old Ruth and the town was moved to New Ruth which I decided out of interest to visit. Later I found out that Stephen King had stayed at the Hotel Nevada and had also visited New Ruth, which inspired him to write his horror novel Desperation. I can see why, as I have never seen anywhere on earth that evokes the horror of New Ruth, not even Eureka. It is set amidst a lunar landscape of mine tailings and consists of the most wretched collection of shacks I have ever seen, paired with the most derelict collection of cars. The shop is closed, the bar is closed, everything is closed. If this is the American Dream, then for the 500 people who remain in Ruth from its heyday of 2000, the dream is as tattered at the Stars and Stripes which flutter sadly outside their hovels. The ultimate irony is that the copper mine here had finally closed down a few years ago, but the price of the metal has rocketed to such an extent due to demand from China that it has re-opened, or rather sifting through the mounds of waste is taking place. Quarrying in the tailings of past mining for copper traces is now commercially exploitable. It is almost too apt a symbol of the current situation of US capitalism and its dependence on the Chinese Dragon.
That night I skipped the hotel’s anodyne restaurant and went looking for something in town. There wasn’t much and I finally settled on a place designated The All-American Pizza. Pizza? All-American? Anyway I have to say it was very good and very cheap, the guy serving obviously glad to see me bringing some business in addition to that provided by the few kids hanging around spinning out their milk shakes. As a result he was being even more obsequious and intrusive than are most American serving staff. It was only after I had ordered that I noticed the place was festooned with US flags, not unusual, admittedly, but the addition of a large amount of National Guard and US Army memorabilia was somewhat out of the ordinary. I looked at my host who had those fixed staring eyes and an obsessive-compulsive mania with his constant tidying of the forks, spoons and sauce bottles on his tables one after the other, and I thought, ‘Oh, oh … lets eat up quick and get out.’ Then I noticed his T-shirt and its slogan, ‘God won’t show you the way unless you stand on your own two feet,’ and was again reminded of the truth, even in far-flung Ely, of Voltaire’s aphorism that, verily, Man creates God in his own image. He may stand on his feet and polish his tables till Armageddon, but even with God on his side he still won’t make that pizza joint pay in run-down Ely.
I felt I had to put space between myself and Ruth, so I drove back across the Great Basin, and then northwards to look at something I knew even at this off-season would not be closed, indeed it is one of the most open places on earth. The Kennecott Utah Bingham Copper Mine to the south of the Great Salt Lake claims to be the largest open-cast mine in the world. Whether one regards it as a technological wonder or as a devastating eyesore, its place in labour history is assured by the events of 1912. In September that year up to 6000 workers of 24 nationalities struck to get recognition for their WFM local, improved conditions and the ending of the use of labour agents (who took a cut of workers’ wages) to recruit miners. The familiar scenario of American – especially Mountain West – labour disputes ensued. The company employed scab Japanese and Mexican labour, hired and armed company vigilantes, who were supported by 300 deputised sheriffs in protecting mine company property – and ensured the scabs got to work. State Governor Spry warned that if clashes occurred the National Guard would be called out to protect strike-breakers, and they were. Clashes resulted in deaths and eventually the workers demands for union recognition were defeated, though some concessions were made on the labour agents’ role in hiring. Though the IWW had little role in this strike, the workers at Bingham were tarred with the Wobbly brush.
It was the same Governor Spry who refused, despite President Wilson’s intervention, a pardon to Joe Hill who was executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City in November 1915. There is a grassy mound in Utah’s capital where the old state pentitentiary stood, and where he died, though there is no memorial to the man who is possibly the most famous of all the hundreds if not thousands of workers killed by the American state and its agencies during this period. Yet Joe Hill lives, partly through the songs he wrote such as Rebel Girl, The Preacher and the Slave (containing the phrase ‘Pie in the Sky’) and Casey Jones, Union Scab. These are still sung around the world and they subsequently inspired in turn a whole new generation of American singers and songwriters from Paul Robeson to Woody Guthrie through to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
Joe Hill was born into poverty as Joel Hägglund in Sweden in 1879 and emigrated to the USA in his twenties. An itinerant unskilled labourer, he joined the IWW and took part in several industrial disputes, but his songs were his real contribution to the workers’ struggle at this time. In 1915 he was working in a silver mine in Park City, Utah and charged with the murder of a shopkeeper. There was no actual robbery from the shop and as Hill did not know the man, no apparent motive. But Hill was active in the IWW against which hysteria raged at this time and the jury convicted him of the murder. A key witness was a 13-year-old-boy who at first stated that Hill was not the killer but who was subsequently persuaded to change his mind and say that he was.
The shopkeeper had shot at his killer and Hill had a bullet wound. But four other people were treated for bullet wounds in Salt Lake City that night. None of those were IWW members, and none of them were investigated. In the film from 1971 by Bo Widerberg, The Ballad of Joe Hill, the wound is alleged to have come from the enraged husband of a woman Hill was having an affair with, and honour made him remain silent as to its origin. Whether this romantic explanation is true is debatable; what is not debatable is that Hill’s conviction was unsound and that his death was a judicial execution. Asked how he wanted to die, Hill chose the firing squad; asked where he wanted to be buried he reportedly made only one stipulation, ‘I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.’
Berman’s book is very interesting on the interrelationship between Mormonism and Socialism in Utah. Contrary to what might be imagined, what socialist support there was in Utah was as widespread in Mormon as in ‘Gentile’ circles. Several Mormon elders and a bishop were prominent in the Utah Socialist Party. The majority of Mormons rejected socialism however, partly because of its supposed atheism and partly because as one Mormon said, ‘Our Church gives us what you promise us.’ Or in other words: social welfare. Despite this several towns in Utah elected socialist representatives to office at this time, such as the mining town of Eureka in 1907 and 1911, where co-operation between Mormon and non-Mormon miners had replaced the conflict of 1893. And in 1919 the Utah Federation of Labour endorsed the new Soviet government in Russia. It should be remembered that at this period it was within living memory that the LDS Church had abandoned not only polygamy, but also a large degree of communistic ideology.
If the moderate SPA largely – and wisely – ignored the religious issue in an attempt to win support, the same cannot be said of the IWW who were very active in Salt Lake City at this time, leading a strike in 1913 against the Utah Construction Company and a ‘Free Speech’ campaign in the city. Typical of the Wobblies’ propaganda was the following, hardly likely to gain a sympathetic ear from LDS working men.
The wage slaves in the Mormon stronghold are getting pared loose from their ancient superstitions, handed down to them by the prophets of the faith. Typical of all religions, the statue of the chief prophet in Salt Lake has its back towards the Temple and its hand outstretched towards the bank.
It is undoubtedly true that the labour and socialist movements always had a much harder job in the United States than in Europe. The all-pervasive American individualism, the country’s wider social mobility and political democracy, and the deep ethnic divisions in the American working class all made for slow progress. Nevertheless it is worth recalling that Eugene Debs’s 6% of the vote in 1912 was hardly less than that gained by the British Labour Party in 1906 in its first contested election. Yet the Labour Party has gone on to become a regular party of government in the UK, whilst the SPA has disappeared, and what remains of the trade unions have become an appendage of the Democratic Party.
Why did the American socialist movement all but disappear after 1920? The ability of mainstream American parties to co-opt ideas from third groupings is clearly one factor. Reading Berman’s book, it is obvious that there was another factor involved as far as the American South-West goes: outright repression. Once war broke out in 1914 and especially after US entry in 1917 – which entry was opposed by the Socialist Party – a wave of violent repression against socialists and trade unionists was launched in the USA that was more akin to contemporary developments in Tsarist Russia rather than to the situation in European countries like Britain, France – or even the Kaiser’s Germany.
Even before 1914 the labour activists were met with a level of beatings, deportations and kidnappings hardly to be expected in a democratic country, and during the war this intensified to an extent that not only a job, home and freedom were at stake, but many feared for their lives. Berman’s book retells a period of US history of which most Americans probably remain ignorant. This story continued well into the 1920s and it is no exaggeration to say that the persecutions of Macarthyite era some 30 years later were mild compared to events of that time. That this was a ‘democratic’ repression which was launched with the support, or at least the tacit approval, of the majority makes it no less ‘undemocratic’ an episode. Many Americans believed tales of trade unionists and socialists as being German agents, as readily as they credited the reports of sightings of German bi-planes in the mountain states. Today many of their descendants believe in UFOs, abduction by aliens – and that Obama is a Muslim.
My final thoughts on this personal archeologising of the history of a neglected aspect of the South-West’s history were that whilst the Anasazi have gone, they are remembered. The militant miners of the period 1890-1920 are also gone, but are almost totally forgotten apart from mentions in a couple of Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill songs. Significant to me was that in places like Bisbee and Jerome I encountered people who considered themselves radicals but in no way did they link up with this former period of western radicalism. Just as much as is the redneck individualism which helped to crush it, the contemporary counter-cultural individualism in the former mining towns is a far cry for the collectivist solidarity of the miners of the past. These men and their womenfolk fought for reforms many of which were later enacted by others, but they also fought for the right to organise, for the right of assembly and free speech, in pursuit of which many of them paid with their welfare and even with their lives. Theirs is a part of the rich heritage of the American South-West that should not be forgotten due to a conspiracy of silence or endemic social ignorance.
Today the de-aggregation and de-politicization of the American working class has gone far, much further than is the case in Europe. And yet, as America’s economic hegemony declines, the situation of wage-labourers in the United States is problematic. Since 1980 real wages in the US have grown by only 10%, that is just over 3% a decade, much less than in Europe. And in the four years since the so-called credit crunch, average incomes in the USA for non-professional and non-executive employees have fallen back by as much as 10%. This has brought US workers, white collar or blue, to an unenviable position, from which all the individualism on earth will not be able to extricate them.