War and Repression
The Law of Necessity
THE SOCIALISTS’ ANTI-MILITARISM presented little problem for presidential candidate Allan Benson in 1916; after all, Wilson swept the West on the peace issue. From 1914 to 1917 American Socialists could oppose the war in Europe without opposing their own government and thus opening themselves to the charge of siding with the enemy. Matters changed after April 6, 1917, the day the United States entered World War I. The Socialist party moved quickly, holding a National Emergency Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 7–14, at which delegates—including fifteen from the Mountain West—adopted an antiwar proclamation later overwhelmingly ratified by the party membership. The St. Louis Anti-War Proclamation and Program stated: “The Socialist Party of the United States in the present grave crisis solemnly re-affirms its allegiance to the principle of internationalism and working-class solidarity the world over, and proclaims its unalterable opposition to the war just declared by the Government of the United States.”1 The party also pledged its opposition to conscription and censorship.
Membership records indicate that the party did not immediately suffer from its antiwar stand—indeed, membership increased from 67,788 in April to 81,172 in June 1917.2 However, as popular support for the war grew, party leaders’ unwillingness to change their anti-miltarism stand hurt the cause. The party’s stand, commonly interpreted as unpatriotic, if not pro-German, prompted many members to abandon the party. Among the more prominent of these were Upton Sinclair, John Spargo, and the 1916 presidential nominee, Allan Benson. Benson’s resignation in July 1918 nearly completed the exodus. Benson declared that he had disagreed with the party’s stand for some time but had delayed resigning in hopes that the party would change its policy. For Benson, “[N]othing worse could happen to the world than to be placed under the heel of German imperialism.”3 Benson felt the Socialist party was not pro-German, in the sense of being in favor of a German victory, but it did have among its ranks some foreign-born leaders who “cannot get the American point of view. All nations look alike to them. . . . They cannot feel what Americans feel.”4 The crucial error, according to Benson, was that “a few men in the party, who should have known better, have accepted the false doctrine that a workingman can have no country, and, therefore, that it is immaterial to him whether the country in which he lives, if it be at war, shall be defeated or not.”5
Socialists who remained in the party became subject to considerable harassment by federal, state, and local authorities. As the war progressed, party newspapers were censored and put out of business by the post office, party offices and meetings were raided, and party officials were threatened with jail for obstructing the draft or engaging in other seditious activities. Some, including Eugene Debs, were sentenced to prison for violating the federal Espionage Act, passed in June 1917. Matters got even worse in terms of repression after the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7, 1917. By the end of the decade the national party had established a Prison Comfort Club to send food and clothing and letters of comfort to political prisoners in Leavenworth and other prisons around the country.
Nationally prominent Socialists came to the Mountain West during the war to stir up opposition to U.S. involvement. In 1917 Socialist Kate Richards O’Hare held antiwar rallies on several occasions at party gatherings in southwestern Idaho.6 O’Hare also found her way to Globe, Arizona, where, according to a special agent for military intelligence, on June 6, 1917, she wooed a crowd of around 1,000 people with an unpatriotic message—although, the agent unhappily reported, not one that would land her in jail. O’Hare, the agent wrote,
is a smart socialist, a good talker, and can stir up the mind of a sluggish thinker in double-quick time by her suggestive manner of speaking. The most disappointing part of this meeting to me was that a great proportion of the crowd seemed to be in sympathy with the views she expressed. When a crowd of this size will stand up for over two hours and listen to the kind of talk this woman made, and applaud as this body of people did, it convinces me that they were hearing the message they believed in. I worked through the crowd many times, and also had other people go through it, and it was alarming the number of champions this woman seemed to have. It was a much more enthusiastic crowd than attended the meetings held to encourage patriotism. . . . I secured a stenographer to take down this speech, but as there was no statement which could be construed as seditious it was not transcribed. It might be proper to state that this woman is of no help to this country at this particular time, as her style is to get seditious thoughts and seditious statements to her hearers by reflection—or on the bounce, perhaps would be a better way of expressing it.7
O’Hare escaped harassment on this occasion. Others, however, were not so lucky. Throughout the Mountain West, citizens acted through organizations known by such titles as loyalty leagues, home guards, national defense committees, and safety committees to track down draft evaders, saboteurs, and war critics. Several states passed syndicalism laws that made mere membership in any organization hostile to the government a crime. Many radicals went to jail on various changes such as handing out antiwar pamphlets and urging men to resist the draft. Some were taken from their homes and even killed. War brought rough sledding not only for Socialist parties but also for the Non-Partisan League (NPL) and especially for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW became a much-hated symbol of radicalism and dissent. The mainstream press constantly accused the Wobblies of being allied with the German war effort—the IWW, to some, stood for “Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors.” Bill Haywood recalled that in 1917: “An extremely bitter stream of publicity had been started by the press, charging the I.W.W. with receiving vast sums of German gold. It was said that we intended to poison the canned goods used by the army, and that we were responsible for the spread of the hoof and mouth disease that was raging and had killed great herds of cattle.”8 Many IWW leaders were convicted under federal or state laws and sentenced to prison.
Support for the war effort and for drives to root out war resisters appeared throughout the Mountain West region, although the slacker rate was generally higher there than in the rest of the country—especially in Arizona and Nevada where mining radicalism was still relatively strong and where, consequently, the population contained a relatively large number of radicals (see Appendix, Table 9). In Wyoming, lawmakers resolved in favor of conscription before Congress had acted on it and commended President Woodrow Wilson for severing ties with Germany.9 Many citizens felt there were German spies in the state. German Americans, labor leaders, and Socialists were immediately suspected, and various groups went in search of them. Colorado citizens and politicians were also eager to track down subversives at home. Among the targets was Governor John C. Gunter, who got in trouble for appointing a German American to the State Council of Defense—for which the media labeled him pro-German and effectively ended his career. Also forced to alter his career was Paul Jones, Episcopal bishop of Utah, whose opposition to the war and support of Socialism (he was a party member) became so controversial that he was forced to leave his position.10
In Idaho, home guards, patriotic leagues, and protective associations took the law into their own hands to root out subversives. People were arrested for advising persons not to register or for merely defending the IWW. Many suspected German Americans of subversion or disloyalty. The suspicion extended even to the German-born governor Moses Alexander, who was criticized for not taking greater action to protect reservoirs, railroad centers, and electrical power plants from enemy agents. Alexander also had some trouble because he refused to dismiss a Socialist draft board member.11 Idahoans apparently believed Germans, working through the Wobblies, were behind a loggers’ strike in the summer of 1917. Governor Alexander visited the strike area and tried, without success, to get the lumberjacks to go back to work. The lumber trust reacted by leading a successful effort for the passage of a criminal syndicalism law, intended to be used primarily against the Wobblies. The act made it illegal to advocate sabotage as a means of industrial or political reform. Even handing out IWW leaflets fell into the category of sabotage. Throughout the summer and fall of 1917 Idaho sheriffs raided IWW halls, swooping up literature and correspondence and making arrests on charges of criminal syndicalism. In the St. Maries fairgrounds forty Wobblies were held in a hastily constructed stockade. Home guards thereafter took it upon themselves to regularly visit Idaho lumber camps in search of Wobblies they could round up.12
In New Mexico, U.S. Senator-elect A. A. Jones told reporters in February 1917, “There may be pacifists somewhere in this country, but there are none in New Mexico that I know of.”13 Yet, although New Mexico officials took pride in New Mexicans’ willingness to support the war, they were also on the lookout for slackers and war resisters. Typical of the warnings was one sent to three suspected war resisters on August 13, 1917, by the New Mexico Guadalupe County Council of Defense: “It has been brought to the notice of the Guadalupe County Council of Defense, recently appointed by the Governor of New Mexico, that you have uttered remarks entirely unbecoming to a person enjoying the Liberty and Protection of the United States and we wish to impress upon you, most emphatically, that such conduct will at no time be tolerated within the United States. This information comes to us through a very reliable source, and should we have such complaint made against you the second time, we will be obliged to apply such remedy as is necessary to counteract seditious conduct, and we are acting under orders given us by the Governor of the State of New Mexico.”14 Authorities followed up by arresting a man for making “false statements concerning the cause of war.”15
Prior to the war, New Mexico had been somewhat quiet on the labor front, having generally been spared the mining conflicts that occurred elsewhere in the region. Labor historian Robert Kern attributes this in part to the fact that the “[s]tate government in Santa Fe never intervened into labor disputes with the same kind of probusiness bias as Denver or Phoenix did.”16 As mentioned earlier (Chapter 10), labor strife may also have been avoided in part because of the successful effort led by John L. Lewis, representing the American Federation of Labor, in getting labor reforms instituted in 1912.
During the war years, however, New Mexico showed a few signs of labor unrest. Mining unions and the IWW were active in Dawson and Gallup, and in the latter thirty alleged Wobblies were deported from the town in 1917.17 Members of the United Mine Workers (UMW) were deported from Gallup along with the Wobblies—a fact that prompted UMW locals, such as one in Tioga, Colorado, to declare the deportation “one of the most dastardly acts that could be committed by the capitalistic class against the working class.”18 Two weeks later a conservative paper reported from Gallup:
As a result of the complete break down of the treasonable strike many of the men are hustling back to the mines to get on the pay roll. . . . These men are going back to their jobs and all that is left is a few aliens, mostly Austrians and Mexicans. . . . Patriotism has won over pro-Germanism, the little plan of the hyphenates and the pro-Germans to tie up the coal output of the Gallup district and thereby tie up the Santa Fe railroad and hinder the movement of troops and war material over that line has proved a miserable failure and the leaders are leaving for other parts to carry on their work of assisting the German kaiser and render the conduct of war for human liberty more difficult for the United States.19
That same year authorities in Colfax County arrested a Wobbly organizer name Jack Diamond on the grounds that his attempts to recruit members for the union conflicted with a New Mexico law that prohibited actions aimed at the “destruction of organized government.”20 More important in New Mexico than actual labor strife was the fear of such industrial conflict because of an invasion of troublemaking radical types being chased out of the neighboring states of Colorado and Arizona.
Two events involving the IWW that had regionwide impacts on the radical cause were the deportation of workers out of Bisbee and the murder of Frank Little. The first of these took place in Arizona where, sensing trouble, George Powell wrote to fellow labor official Henry S. McCluskey on February 8, 1917, that while he was in Phoenix he had come across an IWW official named Perry who said he had $35,000 to organize the state. Powell wrote that he did not know if they could organize Arizona, but he was sure they could stir up a lot of trouble with that amount of money.21 IWW organizer Grover H. Perry had, indeed, arrived in Phoenix and was hard at work as secretary-treasurer of the IWW’s Metal Mine Workers’ Industrial Union. The IWW had made progress in places such as Globe and Miami; in the latter there were several hundred Wobblies, many of whom were Finns. In a handout to miners Perry argued: “The Western Federation of Miners, while it has had its bright spots in the history of the militant working class, is now decadent. It has lost its once militant membership and its officials today are spending more time in legislative halls and company offices than they are at the mouth of the shaft. It has lost its punch. All the red blood that once was in that organization has come into the Metal Mine Workers.”22
Under Perry’s direction the IWW began a process of “boring from within” the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), infiltrating and taking over WFM locals. In 1917 strikes took place throughout the state, all attributed by the mainstream press to the IWW. Discontent was particularly high in Mexican mining camps. Mexican workers told New York Evening Post investigative reporter Robert W. Bruere that they were striking for “an American standard of living” and greater control over working conditions in the mines.23 Arizona newspapers and government officials, however, depicted the striking miners as part of a pro-German conspiracy. Mining company officials refused to meet with union organizers for the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (the new official name for the WFM), whom they considered no better than agitators who ought to be taken into the desert and shot. The acknowledged leader of the copper group, Walter Douglas of the Phelps-Dodge Corporation, was quoted as saying, “We will not compromise with rattle-snakes; this goes for the International of the A.F. of L. organization as well as the I.W.W.”24
The first major mining strike attributed to IWW conspirators occurred in May 1917 in Jerome, where it was reported that fewer than 100 Wobblies were able to convince around 6,000 miners to walk off the job at the United Verde Copper Company, a property of former senator William Clark.25 With the company’s backing, early on the morning of July 10, 1917, a so-called citizens’ group—armed with clubs and guns—rounded up 70 of the strikers, placed them in cattle cars, and deported them to California. After California authorities refused to accept the deportees, they were returned to Arizona, ending up in Kingman. No legal action was instituted against the deportation, and, because of this, union opponents may have felt encouraged to use the method again. They did so a few days later.
On June 27, 1917, at the call of the IWW, copper workers in the Warren district south of Bisbee went on strike against Phelps-Dodge and some smaller companies in the area. Miners called for the abolishment of the shifting scale—which linked pay to the price of copper—in favor of a flat wage of six dollars for eight hours of work, more safety reforms, and the elimination of medical examinations. In regard to the latter, the union claimed company physicians had used required examinations to declare workers suspected of being troublemakers unfit and thus unable to stay on the payroll. Mining company officials at Phelps-Dodge refused to meet with union organizers. Although there had been no violence—strike leaders stressed avoiding violence, and strikers went without coats to show they were not carrying arms—Cochise County sheriff Harry S. Wheeler came from nearby Tombstone “to preserve order” and protect mining properties.26 Many in the area, including the newspapers, felt such action was necessary because the striking miners had stashed away vast amounts of dynamite and numerous rifles for later use.27 Wheeler swore in a number of armed deputy sheriffs, including many people who continued to work for the mining companies. The sheriff arrested striking workers one at a time and hauled them before a makeshift “kangaroo” court where they were given the choice of going back to work or leaving town.
Mine owners believed even more drastic action was needed, and they had a willing accomplice in Sheriff Wheeler. Under Wheeler’s direction a band of men, early in the morning of July 12, 1917, rounded up 1,200 persons in Bisbee they felt were Wobblies or professional labor agitators. Moving quickly through the dark several hours before daybreak, they broke into homes, dragged suspected workers out of bed, marched them to a ballpark in nearby Warren, loaded them into cattle and freight cars provided by the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad—a railway owned by Phelps-Dodge—and, with gunmen on top of the train, sent them on their way to Columbus, New Mexico. The idea was that the deported were to be handed over to military authorities for internment in Columbus. Civil and military authorities in Columbus, however, refused to allow the vigilantes in charge of the deportation to leave the men there. Faced with this resistance, the vigilantes left the deportees in the nearby desert town of Hermanas, New Mexico—a place with a store and a half dozen houses and no city marshal to get in the way of their plans. The vigilantes backed up the train to the Hermanas station and sidetracked it there. The guards got off and awaited the first chance to get back to Bisbee. A local reporter thought the deportees might try to do the same thing, that is, “hold up the west bound train that passes through Hermanas at night and return to Bisbee,” but this did not materialize.28 The reporter also warned, “The feeling in Columbus is running high against Sheriff Harry Wheeler . . . and against the officials of the E.P.&S.W. for sending the I.W.W.’s to Columbus and it is openly charged that Wheeler knew that the military at Columbus would have nothing to do with interning the agitators.”29
On July 13 New Mexico governor Washington E. Lindsey ordered the sheriff of Luna County to go to Hermanas and take charge of the deportees. The sheriff rounded up fifty well-armed deputies and, according to the local newspaper, “went forth prepared to meet a ravening horde of anarchists, I.W.W.’s and other menaces to the established social and economic conditions of Luna County, but when the posse arrived at Hermanas all they found was a mob of men who were more interested in getting something to eat and drink than [in] upsetting the peace and dignity of this or any other part of the southwest.”30 The sheriff talked to the deportees’ leader W. B. Cleary, a Bisbee lawyer who had also been deported, and found no sign of trouble. The strikers were living peacefully, although short on food in the cattle trucks and boxcars.
Arizona governor Thomas Campbell wired Woodrow Wilson on July 12, giving his version of what had happened and asking the president to send troops. Said Campbell: “Industrial conditions throughout Arizona, due to the presence of large numbers of members of the Industrial Workers of the World, coming from outside the state and agitating their propaganda, are rapidly getting beyond the control of peace officers. There are no state troops under my authority, all Arizona National Guard being in Federal Service, making it impossible for me to use this force for the preservation of peace.” The governor went on, “It is generally believed that strong pro-German influence is back of this movement, as the I.W.W. appear well financed and are daily getting (into) their ranks many aliens, particularly Austrians.”31 Wilson, on July 12, 1917, wired back to Campbell that the situation was under investigation. He added: “Meantime may I not respectfully urge the great danger of citizens taking the law in their own hands as you report their having done. I look upon such action with grave apprehension. A very serious responsibility is assumed when such precedents are set.”32 The president made this message available to Phoenix newspapers the following day.
On July 14, 1917, the War Department sent federal troops to escort the deportees back to Columbus. A few days later an army officer told the refugees they were free to leave whenever they wanted. Cleary, though, advised the refugees against leaving. He suggested that they stay together because there was a possibility that President Wilson would order the army to escort them back to Bisbee. On July 22 the deportees voted unanimously to stay in camp, pending federal action. Labor spokesmen in Arizona and elsewhere wired the White House demanding that federal troops escort the deportees back to their homes. Irritated by the lack of federal action, petitioners wired the president in August: “Are we to assume that Phelps Dodge interests are superior to the principles of democracy?”33 This did not move the president, and the offer of an escort never materialized. The deportees began to drift away, although many remained in camp under federal protection until the middle of September. Meanwhile, in Bisbee the Citizens Protection League stayed on alert to prevent the troublemakers from returning to town.
A month after the event Mrs. Rosa McKay, a left-leaning member of the state house from Bisbee, wrote: “For fourteen years I have claimed Bisbee as my home. But after Thursday, the twelfth of July, I hang my head in shame and sorrow for the sights I have witnessed here.”34 At about the same time, the editor of The Wyoming Weekly Labor Journal declared, “When a mob can seize hundreds of men and force them to leave their homes and families, awed and intimidated by weapons of murder, the time has arrived for the people to make inquiry as to what has become of democracy in the United States.”35 The deportations, though, were praised in some quarters. The editor of a mining industry paper, for example, had this to say: “The citizens of Bisbee, Ariz. on Thursday set a fine example of how to handle the lawless I.W.W. The people of the famous Arizona copper camp simply took a day off to purge their city of the I.W.W. plague and they did it very thoroughly. The whole thing was very simple. . . . The Bisbee people have quickly learned of the one and only way to handle the I.W.W. It should become known as the ‘Bisbee system of disposing of organized vagrants.’”36
Officials outside of Arizona may have been happy to see the strong stand taken against the IWW, but they were not overly pleased with the thought that Arizona was dumping its undesirables into their states. The Bisbee deportations set off rumors in Nevada that an army of 1,200 Wobblies, sidetracked at Hermanas, was planning an invasion of the state. Notified by the sheriffs in Esmeralda and Clark counties that the invasion was imminent, Nevada governor Emmet D. Boyle ordered that these men not be allowed to cross the Nevada line and sent a detachment of state police to the southern part of the state to keep an eye on incoming trains.
New Mexico officials were even more concerned. Writing to Governor Lindsey, A. M. Pollard, head of the Luna County Council of Defense, whose jurisdiction included Columbus, asked the governor and the State Council of Defense to do something about the deportees who had flooded the village of Columbus. He was concerned that the deportees, who may have been undesirable citizens, would take up jobs in New Mexico mines and cause the same types of labor troubles that had occurred in Arizona—the types of problems New Mexico had so far largely avoided.
He added, “These men outnumber the citizens of Columbus, and owning to remarks and threats which have been made by these men against some of the citizens of Columbus, these citizens have necessarily become alarmed and desire their removal.”37 Pollard wrote another letter to the governor on August 4, 1917, warning of the impending clash between the citizens of Columbus and the deportees, and he suggested that the governor either put the deportees under military guard (they were presently free to roam around the village) or remove them from the area. Pollard claimed, “They [the deportees] are disloyal to the State and Government and their chief aim in life at present is to try and cause some trouble or out break that would involve the State or Government.”38 Tensions seem to have died down a few weeks later, however, even though 900 deportees were left in the village. Even Pollard seemed to think the situation had gotten better and, indeed, had been exaggerated in the first place. Pollard blamed the panic over the deportees on false reports to the local Council of Defense from El Paso and Southwestern Railroad officials—the railroad used to ship the deportees to New Mexico.39
In August 1917, Governor George W.P. Hunt visited the deportees in Columbus. He found between 900 and 1,000 of them. He reported to President Wilson, “I spent five days in camp, talking to the refugees, singly and in groups, receiving their confidences and learning their views, judiciously questioning them when necessary to ascertain their real frame of mind.”40 He found that about half of the deportees were Wobblies. Some had joined the IWW since, and largely because of, the deportation. At the same time, Hunt concluded, the deportees as a whole were not pro-German or unpatriotic. Rather, “They are just ordinary human beings, struggling in their own ways and according to their own lights for a betterment of the conditions which they expect will be their lot through life.”41 They were people, Hunt continued, who had a “rather personal outlook upon affairs” rather than acting out of concern for mankind in general: “The situation to them seems very simple and practical, and they are wholly unable to comprehend why their strike should be associated with the war, or held by anyone to be an act of unfaithfulness to the government in its emergency.”42 Those who went on strike simply wanted a share of the additional profits the copper companies were enjoying because of the war: “They cannot understand why the war should be so one-sided in its effect upon capital and labor, as to justify extraordinary gain to the former while denying to the latter the right of organized action to secure a living wage.”43
As to the cause of the deportation, Hunt concluded, “I am possessed of the firm conviction—a conviction supported by the scarcely veiled utterances of the mining companies’ chief spokesman—that these incidents are manifestations of a determination entered into by the great copper mine operators of Arizona to crush organized labor in this State, and that, while employing the ‘camouflage’ of patriotic protestations they are in reality using the nation’s extremity to serve their selfish ends, and they are going about their enterprise in a manner that would shame the Prussian autocracy.”44 Mine managers who helped plan and execute this clearly unlawful act, on the other hand, were proud of their involvement.45 They defended their action based on the need to head off violent acts planned by the strikers.
A presidential commission looking into the matter roundly condemned the deportation as an action “wholly illegal and without authority in law either State or Federal.”46 Writing to Felix Frankfurter, counsel for the presidential commission, Theodore Roosevelt took exception to the report. He noted that John Greenway, a personal friend and onetime Bull Moose spokesman in Arizona, was a prominent leader in the deportation. Based on what he had learned from Greenway and others, he believed the federal report was “thoroughly misleading.” For Roosevelt, “[N]o human being in his senses doubts that the men deported from Bisbee were bent on destruction and murder.” The president felt local citizens had the right to protect themselves and had acted properly.47 Similarly, a Cochise County jury acquitted a deputy who participated in the deportation on the grounds that while his actions may have been illegal under normal conditions, they were appropriate because he had acted in accordance with “the law of necessity” in a time of danger. In his instructions to the jury, the judge explained that the law of necessity “protects a man in his invasion of the rights of others when his fear of his own safety or welfare is great enough to force him to a drastic step, and his fear does not have to be fear of really existent dangers but only apparent danger is compelling as to be real to him who views it.”48
In December 1917, about a month after the federal commission’s report, Hunt returned to the governorship when a dispute over the 1916 contest was resolved in his favor. Anti-Wobbly hysteria, however, did not diminish, and Hunt was increasingly the target of attacks questioning his affiliation with the IWW and his loyalty to the nation. Several newspapers published a picture of Hunt between two indicted IWW leaders, Chas McKinnon and Grover H. Perry. The Bisbee Daily Review, on Friday, June 7, 1918, ran the picture, taken from an IWW publication, along with statements declaring its indignation that the state’s chief executive had been “hobnobbing with traitors and enemies of society.”49 Hostile papers also declared that Hunt had made statements indicating that he opposed the war.50
During the summer of 1918, while mulling over his political future, Hunt’s friend Alfred Maddern warned him that he could not count on the support of the Socialists, even though they posed as his friend. Hunt, he argued, should not believe the Socialists’ promise of support because Socialists only voted for nominees of their own party. He reminded Hunt that the Socialists had nearly cost Hunt the election in 1916. Maddern considered the Socialists a “bunch of political highbinders” whose principles were ideal but whose “practices are not clean.”51 Hunt, perhaps in part for this reason, decided not to run again in 1918. He was a political realist who saw that his Republican opponent, Thomas Campbell, would probably win and that a defeat might permanently damage his political career. Drawing upon his status as a long-standing leader of the Democratic party, Hunt was able to secure an appointment from President Wilson as ambassador to Siam (present-day Thailand).
While Wobbly hysteria was reshaping Arizona politics, it was also being manifested harshly in Montana. Events following the miners’ riot in 1914 had left Butte an open-shop town in which the miners were unorganized. Because the rustling card system suppressed the expression of grievances about the lack of enforcement of safety laws, mining conditions became less safe. Proof of this came on June 8, 1917, when a fire broke out in the Speculator Mine in Butte, claiming the lives of 160 miners. The tragedy stimulated a movement for better safety conditions, better wages, and a new, so-called independent union. That union, the Metal Mine Workers’ Union, in which Wobblies assumed leadership roles, came into existence on June 13 and led to a general strike in all Butte mines. Mine owners refused to deal with the strike leaders, claiming they were German sympathizers. Acting on behalf of the miners, Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin appealed to John D. Ryan, president of the Anaconda Mining Company, to abolish the rustling card system. Ryan ignored her appeal.52
In July 1917, while the strike was coming to an end—some miners had given up and, out of money, gone back to work—Frank Little, an IWW organizer, arrived in town. Little had been in Missoula with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in the free-speech campaign and, more recently, in Arizona leading strikes. Little, a small, frail man in his late thirties, was on crutches when he arrived in Butte as the result of a car accident. He pulled no punches while addressing union rallies in Butte—referring to the soldiers sent to Ludlow as “scabs” and “thugs” in uniform, condemning President Wilson for his handling of the deportation of miners in Bisbee, Arizona, and declaring “[t]he IWW do not object to the war but the way they want to fight it is to put the capitalists in the front trenches and if the Germans don’t get them the IWW will. Then the IWW will clean the Germans.”53 The mainstream press denounced Little as a traitor and saboteur. Companies joined in his condemnation, fearing he stood in the way of a strike settlement on their terms.
On August 1, 1917, Little was murdered. The Montana Socialist reported, “In the gray of the morning of August 1, Frank Little, an I.W.W. organizer, was taken from his room in the Steele Block by six masked men, hurried into an automobile, with no covering but his underclothes, driven swiftly to the Milwaukee railroad trestle near the Centennial Brewery and hanged to the trestle.”54 The paper, no friend of the IWW, described the killing as “one of the most brutal, cruel, cowardly murders that ever disgraced an American city.”55 Nine days after the lynching, Wyoming Socialist B. Stewart wrote the Wyoming Weekly Labor Journal and noted that capitalistic press and officials in Montana had suddenly become very quiet about the evils of direct action, the tactic of violence they had regularly associated with the IWW. Apparently, he went on, “it is all very well for capitalists to use direct action on a member of the working class.” If, however, “the case had been reversed and some prominent mine owner or banker had been kidnapped at night and direct action had been used on him by the working class . . . all the capitalist papers would be howling to hang every working man in Butte. . . . If capitalism is going to be allowed to use direct action[,] then the workers to defend themselves will be compelled to use direct action.”56
Little’s murder intensified the hysteria over the IWW and fed fears that once again brought federal troops to Butte. Fear also prompted passage of the state’s anti-sedition law in 1918 and several acts of suppression. The IWW in Montana became the victim of mob actions and raids on its hall.57 Montana Non-Partisan Leaguers, meanwhile, had to cope with groups led by businessmen who tried to prevent them from speaking.58 Montanans charged that the Germans were behind the IWW and the NPL. U.S. Senator Burton Wheeler, a witness to all this, later recalled: “[T]he most bizarre element of the war hysteria was the spy fever, which made many people completely lose their sense of justice. All labor leaders, miners, and discontented farmers were regarded by these super-patriots as pacifists—and ipso facto agents of the Kaiser. There were increasing reports of enemy airplanes operating out of mountain hideaways south of Missoula in the Bitterroot Valley. Just how and why the German High Command expected to launch an invasion of the United States through western Montana, 6000 miles from Berlin, never made the slightest bit of sense to me, but the reports generated by this kind of emotion could not always be brushed aside.”59
As a target in the campaign aimed at radicalism in general, Socialists and their organizations had a hard time throughout the region during the war years. During this period, the Colorado Socialist party’s official paper was put out of business by vigilantes and the post office. In some parts of the state, particularly farming areas, party members were afraid to hand out literature. Elsewhere, the party continued to organize, although very quietly.60 The NPL, however, newer and bolder, energetically organized the state during these years, much to the concern of conservative forces.61 Socialist party leaders such as Secretary Jennie McGehe were not altogether upset by the NPL activity because it was at least keeping the radical movement alive.62 Very little came of the league’s effort, though, except for the election of a handful of state legislators.
By 1917 many Idaho Socialists had moved on to the Idaho version of the NPL, although, by doing so, they contributed to Idahoans’ distrust of the organization.63 The Idaho Non-Partisan League (INPL) began organizing in May 1917 and by August of that year had enrolled around 4,000 farmers. On August 23, 1918, a gang called the “Defense League” attempted to mob the NPL’s founding father Arthur C. Townley, who was about to hold a rally in Boise. Before they could act, however, a group of farmers beat up the Defense Leaguers, some of whom were among Boise’s leading citizens. Townley spoke for two hours from the capitol steps.64 At about the same time, however, in Kootenai County in northern Idaho, a local merchant who rented a hall to INPL leaders for a public meeting received a visit from some business associates that convinced him to back away from the agreement, leaving the INPL out in the cold.65
The INPL had an anti-corporate component in its platform and emphasized securing such measures as state-owned facilities to process farm products, state-owned rural credit banks, and state-owned electrical power systems. Leaders of the Idaho movement, taking their cue from Townley, argued that farmers would get nowhere through third-party activity and that their best bet was to infiltrate and take over one of the major parties. In Idaho the repeated failure of third-party efforts by Populists, Socialists, and Bull Moosers seemed to prove the point. The INPL successfully invaded the Democratic party primary in 1918, with the support of miners’ unions and the state Socialist party. To help the league’s ticket, the Socialists stayed off the 1918 ballot. At the general election, though, the INPL ticket lost because conservative Democrats deserted the party and helped the Republicans sweep the state. The following year the legislature eliminated the direct primary for state offices, making it impossible for the NPL to repeat what it had done in 1918.
In Montana, things had gone bad for the Socialists even before the United States entered World War I. In early 1917 The American Socialist reported:
“Socialists and men who think ahead of the crowd are ‘persona non grata’ to the mine owners of Butte. To keep them out of the diggings the big companies have wooden barriers, a rigid rustling card process and the finest spotting and blacklist system in the world. Practically every man who was ever identified with Socialists by card, friendship or sympathy has been driven from Silver Bow county. . . . They could get no jobs.”66 The same article described Lewis Duncan, the former mayor and Socialist candidate for governor, as “a tired man with blistering hands and feet” who was working as a mucker with an independent company in the Butte mines. Duncan told reporters that the job, which a friend had found for him, was the only one he could find in the area, adding that “I’m going to stay, stay and muck, stay and wait for an inevitable day.”67 The exposure to the people around him, according to his son, was quite an eye-opener: “I remember him saying that he had no idea that the working day laborer was so vulgar and gauche. It was a shock to him.”68 When his health failed, Duncan gave up his work in the mines.
By 1918 the Montana Non-Partisan League (MNPL) had, in effect, displaced the Socialist party as the third party on the left. On the surface, the Socialist party was hostile to the newcomers. However, many Socialists had turned to the Montana version of the NPL, and suspicion grew that at least some of the party’s opposition to the league was intended to help the league avoid the Socialist stigma.69 The MNPL was particularly strong in Sheridan County in the northeastern corner of the state. Charles E. (“Red Flag”) Taylor, editor of The Producer News in Plentywood, was the key figure in the league’s movement in the area. He used his NPL paper to stir up farmers in the predominantly Scandinavian community. In 1918 the MNPL took over the county government. Taylor later joined the Communist cause.70 During the war years, Bill Dunne had greater prominence than Taylor among Montana radicals. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1887, Dunne joined the Socialist party in 1910 and moved to Butte in 1916, where he worked for several copper mining companies. In 1918 he was secretary of the Electrical Workers’ branch of the IWW; vice president of the Montana Federation of Labor; a member of the Montana state legislature, to which he had been elected as a Democrat on a radical platform; an organizer for the MNPL; and founding editor of The Butte Daily Bulletin, the official organ of the Butte Central Labor Council.71 Dunne also later became a Communist.
In 1918 the MNPL and many Socialists backed Montana congresswoman Jeanette Rankin, who opposed the war. Along with her war views, Rankin had been praised by leftist papers for her stand on economic issues. The Appeal to Reason, for example, praised Rankin for a speech in which she declared: “Together with our material improvement has grown the most widespread misery. The workers have no control over the product of their labor. There must be democracy in industry. Economic problems exist not because of the perversity of human nature, but because the laws are made for the protection and special privileges of a few.”72 Addressing a Butte audience in 1918 along with Arthur C. Townley, Rankin reaffirmed her commitment to the cause of workers, both male and female, and singled out for criticism “a certain group of wealthy men in Montana” who opposed fuller democracy in the state.73 Rankin lost the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat and ran in the general election on a national ticket, finishing third. The Socialists had no candidates on the ballot in 1918, and national party records for that year show that only 123 people remained in the Montana Socialist party. The party, however, did have a platform. One section of this document suggests that the party had retreated from its firm antiwar stand: “We are, first, for Winning the War. We shall indulge only in legitimate criticism, and then only at times when it will be harmless to the government in its prosecution of war plans, and harmful to those whose conduct is inimical thereto.”74
In Nevada the relatively good showing by Socialists in 1914 and 1916 encouraged nationally prominent radicals to establish a Socialist colony called Nevada City on land reclaimed by the Newlands Reclamation Project. They anticipated that the colony would eventually add around 5,000 party supporters to the state’s electorate and thus help swing the state to Socialism. Promoters also hoped the colony would provide a haven for radicals who had been taking unpopular anti-militarist stands. Despite advertising in Socialist journals throughout the country, the colony failed to reach the targeted number (although the amount of growth is difficult to tell because of rapid turnover in membership). The colony added to the state party’s ranks—making its base far more agricultural in nature—but, after the United States entered World War I, the Socialists’ antiwar stand aroused considerable antagonism toward the colony, forcing most of the residents to leave.75 Nevada officials, meanwhile, as illustrated in the Bisbee deportation episode, did what they could to prevent radicals from entering the state.
By 1917 Nevadans, Socialists included, were caught up in the tide of national patriotism. Many Nevada Socialists appeared to favor the war and quickly dissociated themselves from the national party. A particularly severe blow was A. Grant Miller’s decision to leave the party. Tendering his resignation on September 1, 1917, Miller said he was doing so in part in the belief that Germany had to be defeated: “As I view it, the success of Germany means the triumph of autocracy to such a degree that the emancipation of the working and producing class would be set back fifty years at least.”76 Miller not only quit but did a complete turnabout: he joined the Republican party and helped ferret out subversives as head of Nevada’s wartime Defense Council.77
One incident that captured considerable attention in the state involved a Socialist named Al Shidler, a smelter worker who lost his job in 1916 for his vocal opposition to conscription. Nye County sheriff William H. Thomas, also a Socialist, gave Shidler a job as a deputy. Upon hearing this, the Loyalty League complained to the county commissioners, who removed Shidler from office. Shidler was later convicted of sedition and sent to federal prison. Thomas, in trouble for helping Shidler and for using striking miners as deputies in a labor disturbance in Tonopah, lost his 1918 reelection bid. In that election the Socialist candidate for the U.S. Senate received only 710 votes out of 25,563 cast.
From Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, the story was equally grim. While meeting with his cohorts from around the country in Chicago during the summer of 1918, Utah Socialist party secretary C. T. Stoney reported that comrades outside the cities were afraid to call or attend meetings. The members, Stoney proclaimed, “are scared breathless.”78 At that, conditions even in the cities were not ideal, and the party’s activities there had been cut to a minimum awaiting the end of the war. Party members, Stoney concluded, “are afraid of their jobs and they do not dare to come out. Thousands of people throughout the state have lost their jobs because they have leaned toward Socialism.”79 Stoney also ventured the belief that Mormons were attracted to Socialism but felt they did not need the party because they could get everything Socialism had to offer through the church: “They tell us, ‘Yes, these things are all true, but we will get them through the church, outside of Socialism.’”80 In 1918 the Utah party held on, with an average membership of 324 members; that number had been as high as 772 in 1912 (Appendix, Table 3).
In New Mexico, chambers of commerce and leading citizens, fearful of radical activity, flooded the governor’s office from 1917–1919 with mail offering exposés of revolutionary plots and making demands for protection.81 The chair of the New Mexico Council of Defense warned Senator Albert B. Fall in 1918: “There are a great many Socialists in New Mexico, particularly among the homesteaders and farmers who have recently come here from Oklahoma and Texas. We hear vague rumors of their meeting and organizing to destroy property and interfere with the production of food and other things necessary to carry on the war, and we are having this matter investigated.”82 A New Mexico newspaper in the heart of the area where such activity was suspected noted that citizens had been somewhat tolerant of Socialists in the past, willing to “permit them to rant and roar” because “it was thought their vociferous hog wash could do no harm.” Now, the editor continued, with the country in crisis, criticism of the war will not be tolerated, and Socialist meetings “at which the government of the United States is being roundly criticized and belabored for having entered the war” must come to an end, “peaceably if possible, forcibly if necessary.”83 In 1918 the state party secretary reported he had lost several members and was having difficulty holding on to or even making contact with the remaining 167 members in the four active locals in the state.84 In 1918 the Socialist candidate for governor polled only 1.8 percent of the state vote. The party was well on its way to becoming a small, secretive sect.
Arizona featured an assortment of legal actions aimed at Socialists. A newspaper account of July 15, 1917, for example, related that in Globe, “Councilman P. H. Brouilett, Socialist member of the City Council,” had been “arrested by a city policeman to complete a quorum for the purpose of passing a new ordinance forbidding incendiary speeches.”85 The following year brought accounts of a man arrested in Arizona simply for possessing a supply of the Socialist party’s assessment stamps. The government failed to get an indictment, but indictments were forthcoming to a Socialist for possessing a pamphlet titled “War, What For” and to another who loaned the same pamphlet to a woman who turned out to be a government agent. At about this same time the government also charged a Socialist war protestor in Oatman with attempting to interfere with the national government’s recruitment program. The Socialist admitted that he had approached men of draft age and urged resistance. On advice of his attorney he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to thirteen months in Leavenworth.86 Witnessing all this, Arizona Socialist party secretary Alice Eddy, in 1918, painted a bleak picture. In mining areas, where the party had built its strongest locals, she reported that party members were being deported and driven out of the state, and those who remained were very timid, afraid even to hold meetings. Eddy concluded: “We have to keep still and cannot do much, and I do not think I could recommend anything that can be done in the state until after the war. . . . It is possible to hold meetings in Phoenix, but I doubt whether that is so in other parts of the state.”87
By 1918 the Socialist party in much of the region had disappeared. In 1912 there had been more than 8,000 party members in the Mountain West region; by 1918 there were fewer than 2,000 (Appendix, Table 3). Over the years there had been a general tendency for parties in the region to lose 30–34 percent of their members in the year following a general election (1912, 1914, 1916) and to have membership rebound slightly in the next general election year. In 1918, however, there was no rebound. From 1917 to 1918, the number of party members in the region declined by 1,325, more than 40 percent. In the longer period between 1916 and 1918, membership in the region dropped off by around 60 percent. In Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada, membership losses hovered at around 80 percent. In an understatement, Chairman Stoney concluded in 1918: “The possibilities in the State of Utah at the present time are not very great.”88 Socialists around the region could have said the same thing, although each would have had slightly different explanations for this state of affairs, as did future scholars.