The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Ninety years ago today six masked men broke into a boarding house in Butte, Montana. At the time miners for the Anaconda Copper Company in Butte were on strike following a fire in the mine that took place in June of that year that led to the loss of 168 lives in what is still the worst hard rock mining accident in US history.

Frank Little, a strike organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), was savagely assaulted in his room before being dragged outside. The gang tied Little to the rear of a car and dragged him for several miles out of the town to a nearby railway bridge where he was tortured and eventually hanged.

Little was born in 1879 and with Native American ancestry on one side of his family and Quaker on the other, often wryly observed that he was the only ‘real’ American in the IWW. He became a hard rock miner when he was 21 and joined the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) quickly becoming an organiser. While working in the mines he was involved in an accident and lost one of his eyes.

When the WFM helped to found the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 Little went on to spend the next 12 years organising workers in mining, forestry, transport and agricultural sectors. He was also to the fore in successful Free Speech Fights conducted by the IWW in Fresno, Missoula and Spokane. These followed decisions by an increasing number of City Councils in the US to ban public speaking or assembly in order to combat growing numbers of radical socialist and labour organisations.

To combat these laws, IWW activists used civil disobedience, exercising their right to free speech and being jailed as a result. As Little pointed out, “The best method of repealing a bad law is to make the officials enforce it.” Jails and prisons were quickly filled to such a point that in many cities, the Councils were forced to reverse their decisions but not before many activists, including Little, spent months in prison in harsh conditions. He was sentenced to 30 days hard labour in Spokane for reading the Declaration of Independence on a street-corner and to 28 days solitary confinement in Fresno with a diet of only bread and water for similar offences.

By 1914 Little was a member of the General Executive Board of the IWW and as such was a regular target of company violence. He was kidnapped on several occasions during which time he was beaten and threatened but never desisted in his work.

In 1917, along with much of the United States, the IWW was split on the issue of American involvement in World War One. Although adamantly opposed to the war, there was reluctance within the union to oppose the draft in a climate of fanatical jingoism. Little was passionately opposed to the war, arguing that it would mean the end of free speech, freedom of assembly and the slaughter of thousands of workers. Other IWW leaders argued that opposing the draft would invite such a level of government repression that the union would be destroyed and besides, organised labour in the US did not have the power to stop the war and should instead focus on organising workers in key areas of industry where strike action might impede the war effort. The union eventually agreed a compromise position using legal mechanisms of opposition to conscription.

During the debates, Little was involved in a labour dispute in Arizona and surprised the Governor who accused him of a lack of patriotism when he threatened to take strike action in the mines during wartime. Little, who was always the union’s most outspoken opponent of the war summed up his position in responding that “I don’t care what country your country is fighting. I am fighting for the solidarity of labour.”

Shortly afterwards, the IWW sent Little to Butte, Montana. He was in ill-health at the time suffering from a broken ankle inflicted during strike action in Arizona and a double rupture after a beating in El Paso. At the time, Butte provided 30% of the nation’s copper and 10% of the world’s. Due to the war in Europe it was working on a 24 hour basis with no increase in wages and atrocious conditions for workers.

When fire broke out in the Spectator Mine in June 1917, 168 men were trapped inside. Many bodies had their fingers ground down to the second knuckle clawing to escape through sealed escape hatches.

Little threw himself into the strike helping to raise money and organise workers claiming that through co-ordinated strike action workers could bring a halt to US involvement in the war.

“With 50,000 workers in the agricultural fields demanding their rights, with 46,000 men in the logging and lumber camps on strike, and with thousands of men in the copper mining camps of the US out, we will give the soldiers of this country so much to do at home in the next few months, they will have no chance to go to France.”

He was murdered less than two weeks later and no-one was ever arrested in connection with the crime. He was buried in Butte where his epitaph reads: ‘Slain by capitalist interests for organising and inspiring his fellow men’.

Despite his death, resistance by miners carried on sporadically until the Anaconda Road Massacre of 1920 when 15 strikes were shot, two fatally, by company agents. Shortly after, Federal troops were sent into the area and miners returned to work although all IWW members were blacklisted.

The labour struggle in the US, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is one that often seems to be better appreciated outside of America than in it. Certainly, standard US school textbooks tend to gloss over the struggle for an eight hour day, the Haymarket martyrs and Lawrence.

Little was one of the less well-known figures of the IWW period in part because in the Federal crackdown on union in 1917 his personal papers and effects were all destroyed. Part of the reason for this post is because most of the existing biographies of Little on the net are quite brief, including the one on the IWW’s own site though there’s a very good one here.
I had just read an article about Little in Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World when WBS invited me to start writing for the Cedar Lounge and so picked the name in recognition of a trade unionist who died for his beliefs and about whom little is remembered. On the 90th anniversary of his death, I thought some sort of post was fitting.