Pitching the Battle
Ludlow, Hill, Duncan, and Hunt
RADICALS IN 1913 STILL THOUGHT FONDLY of two major forces working toward the same end in the Mountain West: “As the Socialist party stands for the emancipation of the working class on the political field so the Western Federation [of Miners; WFM] and the United Mine Workers [UMW] stand for the complete abolition of wage slavery on the economic field.”1 Relations among Socialist parties, the WFM, and the UMW were close, although there were bumps along the road that showed up during intense labor disputes. Relations between the WFM and UMW had soured after the WFM joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but the UMW paved the way for the WFM’s reentry into the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1911. The UMW, the AFL’s largest union, threatened to secede if the WFM was denied reentry. Both mining unions had many Socialists among their ranks, some of whom were in leadership positions and hoped to use their influence to turn the AFL in a leftward direction. Both unions and Socialist party activists in much of the country had a common irritant in the IWW. For mainstream Socialists trying to build a mass-based political party, the less they or anyone else heard from the troublemaking Wobblies, the happier they were. The IWW dismissed political action and, when it came to action on the industrial front, liked to tell miners that the WFM, in joining the AFL, had “lined up with the reactionists as one of the main bulwarks of the capitalist system.” It was, as a consequence, no longer a revolutionary force and had lost whatever ability or desire it had to win strikes.2
The WFM at the time of its reentry into the AFL was still leftward leaning and willing to engage in industrial conflict in Arizona (with the help of Governor George Hunt) and other places, even moving to defend the rights of “non-American” workers it had previously neglected. As for the other miners’ union, the Appeal to Reason happily reported in February 1909 that the UMW convention had adopted a resolution introduced by Frank J. Hayes, Adolph Germer, and James Lord, among others, that called for “public ownership and operation and the democratic management of all those means of production and exchange that are collectively used” and demanded “that every man or woman willing and able to work can have free access to the means of life and get the full social value of what they produce.”3 Going into the 1910s the UMW was an organization in which Socialists had considerable influence and was in a restless and bold mood. It made some dramatic moves in the Mountain West, particularly in Colorado where events led to tragedy at the mining camp of Ludlow.4
The IWW showed up in various places in the Mountain West. Members like Frank Little continued to engage in free-speech battles. In this regard an IWW publication in March 1913 noted: “The boys in Denver have been returning to jail as soon as released, thus keeping up the fight until reinforcements arrive. Those who have fought so far are of many nationalities, and so show clearly the solidifying power of the One Big Union.”5 Another report a few months later read, “Things are beginning to move in this dead burg of Denver—the best lighted cemetery in the world. Since the settlement of the free speech fight extensive agitation has been carried on with splendid results.”6 Some of the more dramatic cases involving the IWW concerned the murder of Joe Hill in Utah and complex relations with the Socialist party and the WFM in Butte, which produced more violence and the entry of the state militia.
In 1913–1915, developments involving the activities of the miners’ unions, along with the IWW, captured most of the attention in the Mountain West and, indeed, given the violence and dramatic turnabouts, considerable notice in the nation as a whole. Colorado during this period continued to be plagued by labor problems—most dramatically in the coalfields where labor agitators, including the eighty-two-year-old Mother Jones, did what they could to make life as difficult as possible for John D. Rockefeller. Developments began in the spring of 1910 when the UMW initiated strikes in the coalfields of northern Colorado to force owners to bargain with the union. Later, realizing it would also have to shut down coal operations in the south to have any effect on the market and thus, on the companies, the union sent organizers to the southern coalfields, largely in Huerfano and Las Animas counties. The operation was a clandestine one; organizers posed not only as ordinary miners but also as house painters, peddlers, and religious personages.7 Still, they did not go unnoticed by the mining companies. LaMont Montgomery Bowers, an agent for Rockefeller who kept an eye on the Colorado situation, reported to headquarters in 1912 that the men working for Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CFI) were well paid and housed and seemed content but that union agitators were constantly “dogging [at] their heels” and that “we are always fearful of strikes . . . we can never tell when trouble will come.”8
By September 1913 the visible phase of the organizational effort took over, as organizer John R. Lawson and Socialists Frank J. Hayes, Adolph Germer, and Mother Jones, fresh from a similar conflict in West Virginia, began openly agitating and directing strike activity around Trinidad against the CFI and two other firms. Their major demand was recognition of the UMW as the miners’ bargaining agent. Without this, whatever concessions were won from the company in a moment of weakness might be taken back. The mining executives refused even to confer with the miners. The miners went on strike in late September, and sixty-six people were killed before it was over.
As miners walked off the job, mine operators brought in trainloads of nonunion labor, mostly immigrants, using armored railroad cars. They also looked to the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, which had dealt harshly with a miners’ strike in West Virginia, for additional men to protect strikebreakers and mining property. Sheriffs in the strike areas owed their jobs to the coal companies. Accordingly, they welcomed the incoming gunmen and gave them commissions as deputy sheriffs. The deputies rounded up and arrested dozens of striking miners for interfering with the hiring of strikebreakers. Mine managers responded to the strike by evicting miners and their families from the company-owned housing. In anticipation of this move, however, the UMW had shipped in tents from West Virginia and, when the crisis came, relocated miners and their families into tent colonies on property rented by the union. The largest of these was in Ludlow, eighteen miles north of Trinidad. Others were located at Walsenburg, Rugby, Aguilar, Forbes, Suffield, and Sopris.
Following some gun battles between the mine guards and the strikers, Governor Elias Ammons, in late October 1913, ordered the Colorado national guard, around 800 strong under General John Chase, into the southern Colorado coalfields. Rockefeller associates and prominent business leaders in the state apparently had been able to “reeducate” Ammons, a Democrat elected with labor support.9 Upton Sinclair later described Ammons as a kindly man, “in intellectual caliber fitted for the duties of a Sunday school superintendent in a small village,” the type of person corporations deliberately select for leadership so they do not have to worry about anything.10
Reporting from the field, UMW organizer Adolph Germer, a Socialist who later became national secretary of the party, wrote to the national office on November 30, 1913: “General Chase has finally succeeded in putting his pet idea, the court martial[,] into operation. He says it is only for the purpose of investigating offenses. . . . He has ordered the wholesale arrest of strikers, especially the Greeks. The militia is operating with the same evident hostility against the strikers as under Peabody. The soldiers are now performing the same duties at the expense of the state that were formerly performed by the mine guards at the expense of the coal companies.”11 Colorado Socialist leader George N. Falconer used the episode to illustrate the fact that the capitalist government, whether under Republicans or Democrats, “is nothing but a business man’s committee.”12 The party chief also referred to Colorado as “the land of big mountains and puny statesmen; a land possessing an invigorating climate, and as ugly a bunch of raw, crude, insincere, brutal political huxters [sic] as ever crawled from some dark corner to cut down their unsuspicious prey, and lots of them attend church regularly.”13
One of the guard’s first objectives was to get Mother Jones out of the strike area. The militia, known in Socialist circles as Ammons’s “dogs of war,” accomplished this in January 1914 by escorting Jones out of Trinidad. Around 150 guardsmen greeted her attempt to return to Trinidad a month later by locking her up in a San Rafael hospital facility converted into a military prison. She was held incommunicado for nine weeks. According to Jones’s diary: “Outside my window a guard walked up and down, up and down day and night, day and night, his bayonet flashing in the sun. ‘Lads,’ I said to the two silent chaps at the door, ‘the great Standard Oil is certainly afraid of an old woman!’ They grinned.”14 The New York Call chipped in with the thought that Mother Jones had achieved a new type of American citizenship: “a military prisoner in time of peace.”15
On January 22 the troops received more bad press when Chase led a charge of mounted guardsmen, swinging their rifles, into a crowd of women and children parading in the streets of Trinidad demanding Mother Jones’s release. The general’s anger may have been fueled by the smirks on the faces of some of the demonstrators who had seen him fall off his horse earlier in the proceedings. For his part, Chase said the parade had gotten out of hand and that the demonstrators had to be forcibly put down and dispersed. He further saw the parade as an attempt by labor radicals to use women to cause disorder and further their ends: “They adopted as a device the plan of hiding behind their women’s skirts, believing, as was indeed the case, that it would be more embarrassing for the military to deal with women than with men.”16 As for Mother Jones, the general concluded that she seemed “to have in an exceptional degree the faculty of stirring up and inciting the more ignorant and criminally disposed to deeds of violence and crime. . . . I confidently believe that most of the murders and other acts of violent crime committed in the strike region have been inspired by this woman’s incendiary utterances.”17 He also noted that some of the strike leaders told him Jones’s ability to arouse the workers in the early stages of a strike made her invaluable as an organizer but that she inevitably turned out to be an embarrassment to strike leaders in the later stages, particularly when they were trying to work out a compromise or an adjustment. Mother Jones, it seemed, marched to the sound of her own drummer, often much to the annoyance of strike leaders.18
A few months later the national office of the UMW responded to Jones’s plight with a wire to President Woodrow Wilson: “Federal intervention sorely is needed in Colorado. We can ill afford to talk about protecting rights of American citizens in Mexico as long as a woman 80 years old can be confined in prison by military authorities without any charge placed against her, denied trial and refused bond, her friends prohibited from communication with her.”19 Chase, hearing about this message, sent a telegram to Wilson stating that there was no need for federal intervention because Colorado military authorities could handle the situation in the southern coalfields. Chase, whose men had razed the Forbes tent colony a few days earlier, said he was going to keep 450 men on duty in the southern coalfields and that no reductions could be made at the time.20
Socialist party leader Falconer, meanwhile, had accepted an invitation from the Trinidad Socialist local to spend a few days among the miners in the strike zone. Falconer reported that he was so well received by the striking miners that he ran out of literature. Everywhere he and other agitators went, though, they ran into soldiers, and in one place they were arrested and taken to military headquarters. The chief obstacle to the mission, however, was the reluctance of UMW officials to allow Socialist agitators to do their work. Falconer reported: “The Socialists of Denver tried hard to get out a 20,000[-run] edition of their party paper, The Colorado Worker, devoted to the strike exclusively, but owing to a cancellation of 8,000 which were to go to the strike zone only about 13,000 were printed. Someone inside the union didn’t want Socialist papers to be read by the miners.”21 The problem, he concluded, was that union organizers were afraid of Socialists or Socialist propaganda coming into strike areas because they felt it only antagonized businessmen and made strikes more difficult to settle.22
Falconer nevertheless conducted meetings and handed out working-class Socialist propaganda in Trinidad, Starkville, Aguilar, and Ludlow. Of the latter he noted: “Ludlow is unique in the annals of industrial warfare. Over 500 miners and their families are housed in tents on land-leased by the Miners’ union. Here they eat and drink with an ever watchful eye on their enemy, the armed soldiery, camped a few rods to the right of them. What a sight! Workers on one side; the armed Hessians of capitalism on the other, each watching and fearing the other!”23 The Ludlow colony of more than a thousand men, women, and children offered a diverse cultural mix—Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, and Mexicans, whose first languages were not English, existed alongside an English-speaking–only minority. Living together under considerable hardship and danger in the tent colony, however, brought an unusual level of community solidarity. Falconer was delighted with the response to his efforts in Ludlow: “A splendid meeting was held in the big tent, and a quantity of antimilitary literature distributed. The men were very hungry for something to read.”24
A few months after Falconer’s visit, the tension he had found in Ludlow erupted into violence. In what is commonly known as “the Ludlow Massacre,” on April 20, 1914, the troops sent into the area went out of control. In an attempt to force the striking miners and their families to vacate their tents and remove themselves from company property, they fired on the tent colony throughout the day. The strikers fired back (some say they fired first) but ran out of ammunition late in the afternoon. At dusk the troops set fire to the tents in which striking miners and their families were housed, causing the deaths of two women and eleven children. Some reports had it that the victims had been burned to death or suffocated in a pit inside the largest tent, which the strikers had dug to shield their children from possible gunfire from the militia. Others, including Ella Reeve Bloor, a Socialist who was in the area agitating among the miners, contended that the children were killed by indiscriminate shooting by the soldiers on bridges before they had a chance to fight their way out of the blazing tent.25 One of the women who survived left two dead children in the pit. Years later her husband remembered: “I was in the hills with the other men. We had our rifles. We saw the flames in the colony. My wife and children were down there. I could do nothing.”26 Along with these deaths, five miners and one militiaman were killed in the battle.
The tragedy gave rise to several days of armed rebellion by the strikers and their families, who fought a small war with militia detachments and company guards. While some claimed the mining community was filled with unpatriotic, bloodthirsty radicals, scholar Priscilla Long views the situation differently: “Colorado coal miners and their wives were neither revolutionaries nor radicals. They believed in democracy, and equated America with democratic values. Before Ludlow they had patriotically raised and lowered the American flag morning and night. They had begun all union meetings by singing the national anthem.”27 After the massacre, however, many lost control and went on a rampage.
In late April the continuing violence prompted Democratic state senator Helen Ring Robinson to lead a thousand or so outraged women to Governor Ammons’s office in Denver. The women conducted a three-hour sit-in to pressure the governor into requesting President Wilson to send federal troops into the strike area. The governor made the request, and Wilson sent 1,590 federal troops. Coming into one camp, Major W. A. Holbrook of the Fifth United States Calvary urged 200 strikers to disarm and give their guns to the federal authorities. Holbrook warned:
When the United States speaks it is a matter of serious moment. The President of the United States must be obeyed. We have soldiers and officers here to see that his command is obeyed. We do not want to, nor do we intend to shoot you men. Killing is a terrible thing, but if we must do it, then we will. . . . We have nothing to do with the operators and we have nothing to do with the union. We are representatives of President Wilson who has told me he is extremely desirous of restoring order and peace among you. I have come here to see that his command is obeyed. . . . I have the most friendly feeling for you men, but I insist kindly, now that you give up your arms.28
Sending the troops eventually led to the removal of the militia, the closing of the saloons, and general disarmament.
Socialists did what they could to call attention to these events. Writing in the International Socialist Review in June 1914, Vincent St. John concluded, “The massacre of striking miners, their wives and children, at Ludlow, Colo., by the hired gunmen and state militia of the coal operators has served to emphasize the fact that the workers have no rights that the employers respect.”29 After viewing the scene of the tragedy, Socialist writer Upton Sinclair reported: “I have come home with my nostrils full of powder smoke and the scent of burning flesh; my ears full of the screams of murdered women and children. What I have seen has made me admit for the first time in my life the possibility that the social revolution in America may be one of physical force.”30 In July, Mother Jones announced to a mass meeting in New York City that she was going back to Colorado, a place where babies “were sacrificed in order to protect Standard Oil dividends.” Jones also declared: “The President will have to see to it that the mines are taken away from the Rockefellers! These mines belong to the people! This strike is going on until we break the back of the great capitalist machine in Colorado.”31
Socialist editor Frank Bohn also made a trip to Colorado, where he was mobbed and pelted with eggs by a well-dressed crowd at an open-air meeting in Boulder as he gave the Socialists’ view of the Ludlow affair. Bohn concluded: “Insofar as there is a local ‘public sentiment’ in Colorado it is but an outpouring of the soul of real estate. . . . All the towns people seem to want is eastern investors, tourists and settlers. They ‘are venomous against the strikers’ because they ‘injured the name of Colorado back East.’ That is the secret of the whole aftermath of Ludlow. It was excused, covered up—forgotten. . . . Such is the middle class in Colorado—a greedy, gambling lot of money-grubbers, nine-tenths of them failures—who would stop at nothing in the game of getting rich quick.”32
From the other side, the mine owners told Congress that the bloody conflict had been inaugurated by the miners’ union. The operators’ brief went on: “Instead of a strike this controversy is an armed insurrection against the sovereign authority of the State of Colorado, conceived, planned, financed, managed, and directed by the officers and leaders of the United Mine Workers of America, inaugurated more than a year ago and pursued with a persistency and villainy most insidious and reprehensible. . . . If the strikers are as earnest in their wish to settle the strike as they are active in the circulation of stories of sensational episodes, the difficulty could not continue for even a brief period longer.”33
Women of the camps, especially immigrants from Italy, came to life during the Ludlow strike. For many, this was the first time they had joined men in dealing with the outside world. Inspired by Mother Jones and others, women often took the lead in cursing and attacking the scabs and the military. Jones urged women to encourage or shame men into fighting but also to stand up and fight on their own. She further recognized that women had a certain immunity from violence, which made it all the more difficult for company guards and troops to deal with them.34
In the fall of 1914, some of the women in the strikers’ colony in Ludlow picketed at the train depot, hoping to head off scabs coming into the area for jobs. Federal troops tried to break up the picket. One picketer, Socialist Helen Schloss, reported: “The soldiers surrounded us like a pack of hounds, and tried to remove us from the platform. But alas, they were mistaken, they thought perhaps we would be so frightened that we would run back to the tent colony. But we did not move. One husky solider grabbed me and dragged me from the platform, and I had a toss and tumble with him. Mrs. Dominiske took hold of a post and stuck to it with all her strength. Mrs. Baratolotti had her faced slapped.”35 Schloss, while proud of the women’s resolve, felt compelled to add that life was not that good for the small group of radicals remaining in the area: “The Socialists here are having a hard fight to make ends meet. We have no money and not many workers, and we appeal to the Socialists of this country to aid this weak district. The Socialists are a pack of undesirables here.”36
In August 1914 Schloss and other members of the Las Animas County (Trinidad) Local of the Socialist party formed a committee to recall a judge who had kept dozens of striking miners in jail for several months, holding them illegally as “military prisoners” without bail. They received the support of Mother Jones and Appeal to Reason in their effort to combat what they considered a bankrupt system of justice.37 Several strikers were indicted for the murder of militiamen and mine guards. Not a single mine guard or militiaman was indicted on any grounds.38 Lawyer Edward P. Costigan, a Progressive leader in the state, was able to win an acquittal for some of the indicted defendants. Among those convicted was UMW leader John R. Lawson for shooting and killing a deputy sheriff during a confrontation between strikers and mine guards in 1913. Authorities arrested Lawson in April 1915, and the following month a jury in Trinidad found him guilty as charged and he was sentenced to life in prison. Socialists contended that the trial was a mockery, his conviction based on perjured testimony and jury intimidation. Lawson appealed to the Colorado state supreme court, which in June 1917 reversed the judgment and set him free.
The strike officially ended in December 1914, with the UMW, short of funds and having lost confidence in District 15 officials, writing off Colorado as a lost cause. The union gained nothing for its efforts. It withdrew from the fields, and union miners were permanently replaced by nonunion miners. Showing no affection for the defeated union, one Colorado Socialist party activist predicted: “The United Mine Workers of America is afflicted with the creeping paralysis and another year will see it relegated to oblivion. There are many United Mine Workers in Colorado who will hesitate a long time before repeating the experience of 1913–1914, with only starvation awaiting them at the finish.”39 The Colorado legislature, in an effort to head off future strikes, enacted a law requiring a thirty-day cooling-off period before strikes could begin and created an Industrial Commission to oversee labor-management conflicts. The legislature also passed legislation giving workers insurance against accidents or death. For its part, in an effort to improve its image, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company instituted a plan of employee representation known as the “Rockefeller Plan,” which critics described as a thinly disguised company union. To Socialists, such reforms could be written off as “benevolent feudalism.”
Republican George A. Carlson easily won the Colorado governorship in 1914 by running on a law-and-order platform in the wake of the Ludlow disaster and by championing the call for prohibition; a constitutional amendment to this effect was approved by voters in the same election. Costigan, the Progressive candidate, was hurt by having represented the Ludlow miners and having become one of the principal attorneys for the UMW. Back in the summer, one of his campaign advisers had cautioned that “at this time anything that savors of an affiliation with Socialism does us lots of hurt.”40 Costigan, he said, needed votes from the conservative union-hating rural areas. He risked alienating conservatives by appealing to “the dissatisfied element” and overdoing radicalism.41
Colorado Socialists, meanwhile, directed their wrath at labor leaders, the UMW in particular, and the miners in general. One angry Colorado party activist questioned why Socialists should give a damn if labor leaders in that state such as John Lawson were being carried off to jail when none of them had shown the slightest inclination to support the party. Indeed, he pointed out, “There is not one ‘labor leader’ in Colorado that I know of who would not stick his right hand in a fire and burn it off clear up to the elbow before he would vote a Socialist ballot.”42 Another declared, “The Socialists are the only friends that labor has, and yet when election time has come the strikers have joined forces with the business element, the church people and the scabs—all of whom had literally stood over them day and night with drawn guns—and fought the Socialists with all the fury of beasts.”43
While these events were unfolding in Colorado, Utah faced labor problems of its own. Conditions in the coalfields of Carbon County may have been as bad as, if not worse than, those in Colorado or West Virginia, but, thanks in part to an elaborate spy system concocted by the principal company in the area, Utah Fuel, there was relatively little union activity.44 The same, however, could not be said about Bingham Canyon, twenty-five miles from Salt Lake City, where, rather than dig down in a mine, workers employed by the Utah Copper Company, owned by Daniel J. Guggenheim, and other companies were removing the top of a mountain in search of copper. The open-pit miners were unskilled “new immigrants” from Greece and Italy. Many of them joined the Bingham Canyon Mining Union, a WFM local, which had its fair share of Socialists, and pressed the Americans who led the local to call a strike to improve conditions. National leaders such as Moyer did not favor a strike, but the union went on strike anyway on September 18, 1912. The strike involved 4,000 to 6,000 workers from twenty-four nationality groups—an act of solidarity that Socialists found impressive—and featured workers’ demands for union recognition, improved compensation, and ending the profiting of labor agents, particularly Leon Skliris who recruited unskilled Greek labor for the Utah Copper Company.45
Mine owners responded by bringing in Japanese and Mexican labor to fill the jobs (ending all talk about worker solidarity) and armed gunmen to protect the nonunion workers and the mining property.46 The workers, however, were equally prepared for war. The IWW’s The Industrial Worker related on September 26, 1912: “According to reports the miners have bought up all the automatic revolvers and ammunition in Salt Lake City and nearby towns, while the mining companies have secured high power rifles for the company guards. Much firing has already taken place. Governor Spry has notified the strikers that should they attack the men who are sent in to scab, the militia will be called out. . . . Three hundred deputy sheriffs are guarding the property of the company and a clash is feared as feeling is high.”47 Clashes between the strikers on one side and strikebreakers and deputies on the other eventually resulted in two deaths. After nearly a year, the strikers gave in and went back to work without achieving union recognition by the company, although they had forced Skliris to resign his position as Greek labor agent.
By the time of the Bingham strike, the IWW had made its presence known in Utah. This happened every day on the streets of Salt Lake City because of the presence of a man named John Houland, who hopped around with the aid of an “industrial leg”—a rod in place of a missing left leg—selling copies of The Industrial Worker and other radical papers.48 Wobbly unions also met regularly in the city. In October 1912, for example, the Local 69 of the IWW held a rousing meeting in the Socialist hall downtown in which speakers focused on problems in the southern lumber camps. As was customary, the meeting closed with the singing of revolutionary songs. In reporting on the meeting, the IWW Local Press Committee noted: “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 statute of the chief prophet in Salt Lake has its back toward the Temple and its hand outstretched toward the bank.”49
In 1913 the IWW led an unsuccessful strike against the Utah Construction Company, after which it launched a free-speech campaign in Salt Lake City. At about this time, Joe Hill (aka Joe Hillstrom) came to Salt Lake City. Hill—a native of Sweden—immigrated to the United States in 1902, joined the IWW in 1910, and soon became famous as an IWW organizer and songwriter. He was heading east from California when he decided to stop off in Utah to do some mining. He found work of this nature in Park City in the Salt Lake area. He was later arrested and found guilty of killing a grocer during a 1914 holdup in Salt Lake City. On the evening of the murder Hill went to Frank McHugh, a medical doctor in Murray who, as noted earlier, had been the Utah Socialist party’s nominee for governor in 1912, to treat gunshot wounds in his chest. Hill knew McHugh, and some suspect he went to McHugh thinking that as a fellow Socialist he would be sympathetic and not report the incident to the police. If so, he must have been disappointed. After learning about the murders and the fact that one of the two masked holdup men had been wounded, McHugh informed the police that he had treated Hill. At the time there was considerable tension between Socialists and Wobblies in Utah, which may have influenced McHugh’s decision to tip off the police.
Radicals and all types of people in the Mountain West and around the nation, believing Hill had been framed and convicted because he was a Wobbly, deluged Utah’s Governor William Spry with letters and telegrams on Hill’s behalf. Socialists condemned Utah’s “capitalistic courts” and demanded Hill’s release.50 Officials of Tonopah Miners’ Union of the WFM declared Hill had been convicted “on the flimsiest kind of circumstantial evidence” by a jury biased against the IWW. Hill’s execution, the officials warned, would “put a blot on the record of the State of Utah that the lapse of a thousand years cannot remove.”51 The Socialist party local in Ogden, Utah, was among several Socialist locals in the region to protest Hill’s conviction and ask the governor to spare Hill’s life: “We submit to you that there is a general impression in Utah, that this man did not have a fair trial, and that there is no doubt but that the fact that he had made himself obnoxious to a certain class thru his affiliation with the I.W.W. organization made it easier to convict him. In a large number of states, capital punishment has been abolished. Utah has not taken this advanced step, but it is in the power of the pardoning board to give this man the benefit of ALL DOUBT by commuting his sentence.”52
Radicals claimed Hill was the victim of a campaign against labor conducted by the Utah Copper Company, the Utah Construction Company, and the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons). Despite an international protest by the Swedish government and President Wilson’s intervention, Spry held fast and Hill was executed by a firing squad on November 19, 1915. Hill’s wish “not to be found dead in the state of Utah” was honored, and his body was shipped to Chicago for cremation. He became a well-known martyr to labor’s cause. His statement “Don’t mourn, organize!” became a rallying cry for workers throughout the nation.
Wobblies also had a troublesome time in Montana. They organized a Propaganda League in Butte that distributed literature throughout the district. On several levels the Wobblies had good relations with the Socialist party. Many Wobblies were also members of local party chapters, and Wobblies and their sympathizers regularly voted the Socialist ticket. The Butte party local reciprocated by strongly defending the IWW and the industrial union idea. Local party and IWW organizations, moreover, were united in their criticism of the Butte Miners’ Union (BMU) as a corrupt and conservative organization, alien to the interests of workers.
On the other hand, Montana Wobblies and Socialists, like their counterparts on the national level, fundamentally disagreed over the value of political action. Ties between the two were further strained in 1912 as the national Socialist party, hoping to move more into the political mainstream, began to distance itself from the IWW and became a harsh critic of that organization. In Butte the strain was increased as Wobblies began complaining about pursuing Socialism through municipal reform—reform, they felt, was moving too slowly under Mayor Lewis J. Duncan, and many suspected it would not likely lead to much of anything of a revolutionary nature in any event. IWW members, particularly the Finns among them, also felt Duncan had been unfair to them in making appointments to city positions. Duncan had initially lost the fight within the party over his appointments—some of his selections were rejected by both the Butte party’s central committee and a membership vote—but he defied those actions and declared he was not going to give jobs to IWW members in the manner dictated by the party. Charging that the Wobblies had infiltrated and taken over the Butte party, he asked the state central committee to revoke the local’s charter as a way of eliminating the direct actionists. This was accomplished, causing a loss of about 400 members, including many Finns and union activists.53 The party, though, was reconstituted in short order, with the Finns reinstated on the promise that they would follow party rules.
The Finns still harbored several grievances. They were angry about Duncan’s attitude toward them and, being leftists, about the national party’s recall of Haywood. Many also had an ax to grind against the BMU. Many remembered that they could not persuade members of that union to stand up for the hundreds of Finns fired by Anaconda in March 1912. The BMU strike committee recommended strike action to restore these jobs—it would have been the first strike ever called by the union—but a majority of the members rejected that suggestion. Apparently, even some or many of the 2,000 Socialists in the union refused to help the fired workers.
Many miners in the Butte local were unhappy about the failure of the union to protect the fired workers and also about a “rustling card” system imposed in 1914 by Amalgamated—a system that allowed the company to screen troublemakers by requiring miners to secure what, in effect, were work permits before they could seek employment at one of the company’s mines. Dissidents, urged on by the IWW, claimed that a reactionary, company-controlled faction had gained control of the Butte Miners Union—replacing union officers, mostly Socialists, who had taken positions with the city after Duncan became mayor. They felt the union had made an unfair contract with the mining companies, complained about misconduct in the election of union officials, and were angry about the continuing assessment of wages to help Michigan strikers, even after the strike had been called off. The rumor spread among miners that the assessments were not going to strikers but were being pocketed by union officials. Under these conditions, many miners, especially those who lost their jobs in 1912 and those caught up by the radical economic ideas promoted by the IWW, had little difficulty believing that the WFM, while costing them much in dues and special assessments, was of little or no economic value to them and, indeed, was run by corrupt, company-controlled reactionaries adverse to their interests. Finnish miners were prominent among the rebels.54 Discontented miners took their complaints to WFM headquarters but received no help.
On June 13, 1914, rebellious miners took out their frustration by attacking WFM officials who were leading a parade in Butte honoring Miners’ Union Day.55 A mob pulled the officials off the horses they were riding. The following day a mob took off toward the Miners Union Hall, tearing the hall apart in a search for records and money. Mayor Duncan was out of town, but the acting mayor, Frank Curran, rushed to the scene and from a second-story window urged the crowd to go home. All he got for his effort was a shove out the window and, after the fall, a broken arm and dislocated ankle. The rebels quickly formed a new union, the Butte Mine Workers’ Union, which was independent of the WFM and led by prominent Wobblies.
Duncan returned to the city on June 15. He conferred with city officials, the governor, and the attorney general and concluded that bringing in the militia would just make matters worse. A few days later WFM president Charles Moyer came to town to try to patch things up with the rebellious miners. He called a meeting at the Miners Union Hall for the evening of June 23, which was attended by a hundred or so WFM loyalists. During the meeting an exchange of gunfire broke out between the miners inside the hall and the crowd gathered in front of the hall, and an innocent bystander was killed. By some accounts, including Duncan’s, one of Moyer’s followers started the shooting from inside the hall. At any rate, some men in the street crowd went off in search of dynamite with which to blow Moyer and his followers out of the building. By the time they returned, Moyer and eleven of his followers had escaped and were on their way out of town by automobile. The rioting miners allowed everyone else who had attended the meeting to leave the hall. They then proceeded to blow up the building.
Duncan had earlier checked out the meeting and, finding everything peaceful, left for his office, leaving behind a contingent of police in case trouble broke out. On his way to the office he heard the first shot and saw the crowd falling back from in front of the hall. He later testified: “Between ten and eleven the dynamiting began and I was worried I tell you. I didn’t know how to handle that situation. I called on the governor myself, told him the dynamiting had begun, that it seemed to be directed against the hall, that as near as I could find out, it was an act of reprisal on the part of the people outside against the Miners’ Union because the opening of the assault that night had come from inside the hall.”56 Still, Duncan saw no need to ask the governor to send in the militia. The dynamiting continued until about 1:30 A.M., and Duncan left his office at around 2:00.
Over the next few days, the WFM blamed the IWW for the dynamiting, but Duncan was inclined to dismiss this charge, contending that the WFM had invited the action itself by alienating miners who had been on the job in Butte for years and were loyal union members. The Socialist party also blamed Moyer for trying to put the old company-led union back in power. The AFL and Anaconda, on the other hand, joined the WFM in blaming the IWW. Others blamed private detectives working for Anaconda who had apparently infiltrated some or all of the organizations involved—the WFM union, the new union, and the IWW—to keep track of the company’s employees and foment trouble, acting as agents-provocateurs in an effort to destroy the union movement.57
The mayor stayed in Butte after the riot and was in his office on July 3 when, in a bizarre episode, he was attacked and stabbed three times about the shoulders and neck by Eric Lantala, head of the Finnish branch of the Socialist party in Butte. The mayor fought back, drew a pistol, and fatally shot his attacker in the abdomen. Duncan, not seriously hurt, had been expecting trouble and had a revolver within reach because of threats by the city’s radical element of a physical attack on him. Lantala had demanded that the mayor deport Frank Aaltonen, a journalist who supported the WFM and opposed the IWW, on the grounds that he was a menace to the community. Duncan said he did not have the authority to do so. Lantala had tried to convince Duncan to change his mind and attacked him after he refused.58
Duncan, under fire from Wobbly extremists, also incurred the wrath of the WFM, which accused him of being in cahoots with the IWW and of making a false charge that Moyer had asked the governor to send troops to Butte. At the WFM convention on July 25, 1914, delegates approved a vote of censure against Duncan, along with a demand directed at the Socialist party that it expel him from membership if he failed to retract his statement regarding Moyer. Moyer joined the discussion, remarking, “I don’t care what you do as to the Socialist Party, whether you ask that they expel this miserable, slimy whelp, or not—it matters not to me. If this convention brands him as a liar, I am satisfied.”59 At other points in the convention, Duncan, the onetime hero of the Socialist party, was referred to as a “long-haired freak.”60 The statement was met with applause. Others at the convention tied Duncan to the archenemy, the IWW. If nothing else, many delegates were probably not happy that Duncan had stood by and done nothing to prevent the destruction of the Miners Union Hall.
On September 1, 1914, the state militia, under the command of Major D. J. Donahue, came to Butte. This followed the dynamiting by miners of a company shack where rustling cards were issued. Bill Haywood recounted the subsequent events: “Times were lively in Butte during the reign of Major Donahue and his soldier boys. The writ of habeas corpus was suspended. The press was censored, one paper, the ‘Montana Socialist,’ was closed down. Public speaking was forbidden and members of the I.W.W were deported or sentenced to jail for minor infractions—one for speaking on the street corner, another for singing a song.”61 Amalgamated, taking advantage of the situation, declared Butte an open shop and said it would no longer deal with unions. Those with a record of being agitators or voting incorrectly could not get a rustling card issued by Anaconda’s employment bureau, which was needed to secure employment. The same was true for those with a record of complaining about working conditions.
The Montana Socialists’ state convention in Helena in September 1914 protested “the establishment of military rule and censorship of the press during the mine war” and demanded that Governor Samuel V. Stewart make a “personal and impartial investigation of the Butte situation.” Should he refuse to do so, he stood “as a willing party to brutal conspiracy to intimidate and enslave the people of Silver Bow County, in the interest of the Amalgamated Copper Company.”62 Going the other direction, what was called a “Vigilance Committee,” composed largely of leading businessmen, pushed for impeachment proceedings against Mayor Duncan and Sheriff Tim Driscoll. Both men were impeached, tried in a civil court, and removed from office for neglect and inefficiency in discharging their duties during the riots. Following his impeachment Duncan told a reporter, “My scalp is in the wigwam of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company.”63
In addition to the explosive situation in Butte, WFM leaders in August 1914 were concerned about their failure to gain a firm foothold in Arizona. The WFM had virtually no influence in that state, even though around 30,000 people there were working in and around the mines, mills, and smelters and should have been part of the union.64 Some indication of the problems the WFM faced in Arizona is found in a letter from a local union secretary named John Striegel to WFM organizer Ernest Mills, written on August 2, 1914, from Humboldt, Arizona. In the letter, Striegel resigned as secretary of the local union. The local, he reported, was in debt, unable even to pay the $214 he was owed in back salary. He had been borrowing money from members to keep things going—and to put in a hardwood floor in the union building—but there were only a few members left and they refused to put more money into the organization. More important to Striegel, he had been fired twice in the last five months by corporate managers when they learned that he was with the union. The same thing had happened to other workers in the area. He had a family to support and was going to have to quit the union to get work.65
In early 1915 the WFM took part in a strike in Miami, Arizona, a town of 1,500 people near Globe, of mostly Anglo-Irish skilled workers who protested a wage cut. This turned out to be a peaceful strike, supported by town merchants and devoid of strikebreakers. Governor George Hunt conducted negotiations because the operators refused to deal with any union. The strike concluded within two weeks when the strikers agreed to a sliding wage scale tied to the price of copper.
A strike in Arizona’s Clifton-Morenci copper-producing districts in the fall of 1915, however, proved far more difficult. WFM agents, headed by Guy E. Miller, entered these longtime unorganized districts, where a majority of the miners were Hispanic, in the summer of 1915. At that time the price for copper was low, and owners had recently cut wages. Salaries in the Clifton-Morenci districts were the lowest of any mining camps in Arizona. To compound the problem for Hispanic miners, they received considerably less pay than others for the same work.66 Mine owners defended the practices and fiercely resisted the WFM’s attempt to organize and represent the workers. Miller reported to President Charles Moyer in July that the “Mexicans are alive and enthused throughout Arizona, if the sentiment can be crystallized into organization it will mean much.”67
On September 11, 1915, around 5,000 unskilled and semiskilled mine workers, 90 percent of whom were Hispanic, went on strike to secure higher wages and union (WFM) representation. According to the conservative press, a reign of terror took place as authorities stood by while members dragged strikebreakers out of their beds: “Threats of lynching, abuse and curses heaped upon men and their families at every turn caused many to leave.”68 Managers of the involved companies also fled, telegramming Hunt from Lordsburg, New Mexico, that they had done so because they feared their presence in Clifton might trigger violence. They asked Hunt to rid the area of WFM organizers and to follow a course of action such as the one taken by Governor Elias Ammons of Colorado in the coalfield strikes.69 Hunt, however, by his words and actions concerning the strike, won the applause of organized labor. He made it clear that he was sympathetic to the workers and their demands. More important, unlike other governors of his time, he ordered the national guard into the area to protect those who were on strike and to prevent strikebreakers from entering the camps. Hunt was well aware of what had happened in Colorado and was anxious to avoid another Ludlow situation. Feeling the mining company officials were more likely than the Hispanic workers to incite violence, he made it clear that he would not tolerate the importation of hired thugs and gunmen in the guise of strikebreakers into the district.70
National as well as local labor leaders praised Hunt for his actions at Clifton-Morenci. James Lord, president of the Mining Department, AFL, lauded him for his “fearless and humane attitude” in avoiding what could have been another massacre and placed Hunt on the same level as the “immortal [John Peter] Altgeld” as one of the greatest governors of all time.71 Praise was also forthcoming from Mother Jones, who had been in the state assisting in the organization of miners. She later helped campaign for Hunt’s reelection.72 On the negative side, Hunt enthusiasts quickly pointed out that he had also created some powerful enemies.73
The copper companies did indeed respond with alarm to the demonstration of labor’s strength during the fall strikes, and they banded together in opposition to both labor and Hunt. Mining companies gained control over an increasing number of newspapers and used them to lambaste Hunt for siding with the radicals and, in the context of the European war, unpatriotic worker demands. The fact that most of the striking miners were Hispanic made Hunt, to some of his critics, a traitor to his own people. One paper complained: “The speech made by Governor Hunt in Clifton recently was wholly inflammatory in effect. He caused the strikers to spit in the face of good citizens by telling them that they were as good as anyone.”74 Mining companies circulated a petition asking for Hunt’s recall from office on the basis that he “has deliberately attempted to foment and encourage class hatreds and divisions” and “that by a program of unconcealed and deliberate catering to the most radical elements, he has created a condition approaching anarchy in certain sections of the state.”75
The Arizona Socialist party, meanwhile, took pride in the fact that Guy E. Miller, who had general charge of the strike, and his assistants, Guiterez De Lara of Los Angeles and George Powell of Miami, Arizona, were Socialists. Party leaders said they had made no attempt to “divide the strikers on politics,” but they did conduct “considerable quiet propaganda” such as distributing Socialist papers. These, they thought, were well received because the strikers had considerable time to read, talk, and think. The party expected a victorious outcome to bring it increased support in Clifton, especially among the Spanish-speaking workers.76
Whatever benefits awaited the party, the WFM came out of the 1915 experience in Clifton-Morenci in a weakened position. To many, the strike underlined what had been becoming apparent: the failure of the union to make much, if any, progress in organizing the industry. Members also complained about the heavy assessments levied on them by WFM locals, much of which was used to support a long and expensive strike in Michigan. In 1916 there were frequent calls for “new blood” in the organization at the leadership level. Moyer survived a challenge, but the organization, hoping to get a new start and to shed whatever association it had in the public’s mind with the IWW, in July 1916 renamed itself the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers.