The Missoula IWW General Membership Branch logo for today's Centennial observations in Butte, Montana. |
This
morning out in Butte, the old Montana coper mining town where a
good slice of often violent labor history went down, Wobblies from the Missoula
General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World and
other folks will gather at the grave of Frank Little in Mountain
View Cemetery and then caravan to a picnic area near the Milwaukee
Bridge where the tough as nails union organizer was lynched exactly
100 years ago. They will go out on the trestle
where his tortured body was left dangling and lay a
wreath. My old friend and Fellow
Worker working class troubadour Mark Ross who lived for a good many
years in Butte has returned to town for the event and will no doubt sing—try
and stop him.
The story
of Little and his violent demise would make a hell of a great movie. That one has never been made is testimony
to the suppression and erasure of labor history from popular
culture. Instead his memory is
preserved as a Wobbly folk hero, enshrined alongside other martyrs
of the One Big Union like Joe Hill, the victims of the
Centralia Massacre, and Westly Everet who was lynched in his Doughboy
uniform.
In an
effort to change that Little great-grand niece Jane Little Botkin, has
written the now definitive book on her ancestor, Frank Little and the IWW: The
Blood that Stained an American Family.
Jane Litle Botkin's new book about her great grand uncle details the last 13 days of Frank Little's life in Butte and his murder. |
Little was born in 1879 in Indian Territory, modern Oklahoma.
By his account his father was white and his mother was a member of the Cherokee Nation. Other than that almost nothing was known
about his family life and education until Botkin’s research and book. Botkin disputes
the Native American lineage chalking it up as a good yarn.
Like many of the itinerant
young workers Little left family and much of his identity behind when he hit
the rails looking for work sometime in his teens.
Those from Texas and Oklahoma often did some cowboying and joined the huge
bands necessary to follow the wheat
harvest north across the plains all the way in to Canada. He might have headed
to the Pacific Northwest to lumberjack and harvest fruit, hit the docks
at San Pedro and other California ports, joined railroad construction gangs, and maybe
even washed dishes in a skid road eatery. Frank certainly was at home among these kinds of men, the dispossessed, mobile working class who
would make up the core of the IWW in the West.
Around the turn of the 20th Century, Little found himself
working in one of the most important
industries in the West—hard rock
metal mining. This was brutally hard labor and among the most dangerous work in world.
The mining industry had evolved from small owner operated
claims around boom towns to huge industrial scale operations often owned and operated by Eastern financial interests. Big
companies bought up—and sometimes
outright stole—small operations
and then gobbled up local and regional
operations and near monopolies
in gold, silver, lead, and copper mines. The companies demanded 12 and 14 hour days of back breaking labor six days a week. Safety
of the miners was hardly a
consideration as workers could be replaced
by a “reserve army of the unemployed.” As in the coal industry, there were company
towns and pay in script that could only be redeemed for over-priced goods at a company store.
Conditions
fostered labor rebellion, at first
largely spontaneous and unorganized. From the 1870’s onward in the territories and states of the west barely
beyond the frontier era where civil law was absent or purchased outright by mine owners, brutal, violent strikes were the hallmark of the industry.
By the 1890’s The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) were lending militant
leadership and organization to
the class war in the mines. Little joined
sometime around 1900 and was soon a rising
organizer in the field.
In 1905 the WFM became the largest founding organization of the radical new IWW, which aimed to bring the muscular industrial unionism of the miners to all industries. Steeped in the open warfare of the West, the
WFM brought a particularly pugnacious
variety of bare knuckle direct action to an organization also founded by parlor intellectuals like Daniel DeLeon of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), mainline Socialists like Eugene V.
Debs, and “home guard”
industrial unionists from the East.
The WFM’s Charles Sherman was installed
as the first—and only—President
of the IWW. But his high handed top-down exercise of executive authority was at
odds with the already growing
culture of shop-floor democracy of the union and he clashed with DeLeon and
other intellectuals in the movement.
After a year, Sherman was gone
and the WFM disaffiliated from the
new union.
But many WFM leaders and a lot of the rank
and file, including William D. “Big
Bill” Haywood and Vincent St. John, stuck
by the IWW. With Heywood on trial for the bombing murder of
former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg,
St. John took on the job of General
Secretary-Treasurer of the union.
Heywood followed after he was cleared
in the famous trial in which he was defended by Clarence Darrow.
Little was proud to transfer his loyalties to the new revolutionary union. For the next several years he seemed to be everywhere across the West
in the thick of IWW strikes and battles
in a number of industries. In
addition to his continued work with miners, he organized lumber workers in the Northwest, oil field workers
in the boom towns of Texas and his
native Oklahoma, and California fruit
pickers. He was noted for his fearlessness.
He was part of the Free Speech Campaigns in Missoula, Fresno, and Spokane. The IWW relied on street corner orators like Little to reach migrant workers in the skid roads of towns. From
these areas of shoddy rooming houses,
hotels, bars, and whore houses, bosses recruited workers for the lumber
camps, mines and harvests. In order to enforce strikes on those jobs, the IWW
had to organize the transient workers
who would otherwise become a pool of
scabs.
Town after town attempted to
shut down the street corner meetings by arresting speakers. The IWW developed a tactic by which they would send out a call for “footloose
Wobblies” to flock to the towns and
overflow the jails by mounting their
soapboxes one after another. These successful free speech fights worked
because eventually towns went near
bankrupt feeding and housing the hundreds of defiant IWW members that they rounded up.
Little either helped organize the campaigns, or blew into town to take his place in the
disobedience. In Spokane he was sentenced to 30 days in jail for reading
the Declaration of Independence.
Little was widely respected by the rank and file for his sheer fearlessness. In 1915
in the company of James P. Cannon, much later the founder
of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers
Party, Little came to Duluth,
Minnesota, the Iron Range port,
in support of strike of ore-dock workers
against the Great Northern Railway. Little was kidnapped by company “detectives” and held prisoner in a remote cabin outside of town. Rank and file members got wind of where he was being held and staged a daring rescue mission.
In 1916, Little was elected to the IWW General Executive Board. The
Board was embroiled already in
controversy over how to respond to
the increasingly likely event of American
intervention in World War I. Little was elected as a radical among radicals, backing open and fervent opposition to the
war and a possible draft as the only possible response for an organization dedicated to solidarity of the
world wide working class.
Ralph
Chaplin, cartoonist, illustrator,
pamphleteer, and author of the labor hymn Solidarity
Forever became editor of Solidarity,
the IWW English language newspaper
in the East in 1917. He led a board faction that argued against any
overt anti-war agitation by the IWW for fear that it would excuse the unleashing of a massive government
repression, “un-like anything we
have ever seen.” The majority of the
Board led by Haywood—radicals but also practical
union men—were against general
opposition but supported
continued action in “essential war
industries” even if strikes would disrupt war production. Little was in the small minority who demanded
opposition to the war on principles.
“Better to go out in a blaze of glory than to give in,” he said. “Either we’re for this capitalist slaughterfest or we’re
against it. I’m ready to face a firing
squad rather than compromise!”
After war was declared in April of 1917, Little headed back out to the field where “essential war production” was exactly the target of a major campaign
in the copper industry that
year. There was hardly any more critical
industry in that year than copper, which was essential in the manufacture of brass for millions of rifle and machine gun cartridges, and artillery shells. It was also needed for the miles of telephone wire that would be strung along the front, electrical wiring, and automobile parts for an increasingly mechanized Army.
Little arrived in Bisbee, Arizona where IWW organized Metal Mine Workers Union No. 800. Union presented a list of demands, most of them safely related, to the management of the largest mining company in the area, Phelps Dodge. Despite his personal militancy, Little discouraged calling an immediate strike
on because the union had not laid enough
ground work. But when the rank-and-file voted to go out against the company on
June 29, Little stood by them. He soap
boxed and helped bring out the
largely unorganized workers at two other large operations idling 3,000 miners and shutting down 80% of local production.
In his speeches, Little was not shy about asserting his opposition to
the war. When accused of being a German agent, he told Arizona Governor Thomas Edward Campbell, “I don’t give a damn what country your
country is fighting, I am fighting for
the solidarity of labor.”
Frank Little just missed the Bisbee Deportation. He was on his way to Butte for another confrontation with the copper bosses. |
On July 12 an army of over 2000 “special deputies” swarmed across Bisbee and
near-by towns rounding up all know IWW
members and strikers. Little had
been called out of town on other union business
just before and missed being one of 1,300 men were held at the point of machine
guns and loaded into cattle cars. Over a day and a half in blistering heat and virtually
no food or water they were hauled
more than 200 miles away to tiny Hermanas,
New Mexico where they were dumped
and told they would be shot on sight if
they returned to Bisbee.
Undeterred by what became known as
the infamous Bisbee Deportation, Little wasted no time making his way to Butte where a resurgent IWW was aiding a strike against Anaconda Copper, operator of the world’s largest open pit mine. Once again he fearlessly tied the
worker’s cause to the broader war. His fiery rhetoric included calling American Doughboys preparing to go the France
as, “scabs in uniform.”
Predictably the local press, controlled by Anaconda, had a field day accusing Little and the IWW of being German agents. They openly
called for vigilante “justice”
against the “traitors.”
Meanwhile the town of Butte was infiltrated by Pinkerton Detectives charged with silencing the leaders and crushing
the strike. One of those agents was Dashiell Hammett who became so disgusted by the work that he became
a lifelong radical. He became the pre-eminent writer of hard
boiled detective fiction. His character, the nameless Continental Op, was based on his Pinkerton experience and
his first novel Red Harvest was based on his Butte experience.
In the early hours of August 1,
Little was seized in his rooming house
bed by six masked men. The beat
him, tied him behind an automobile
and dragged him out of town to railroad bridge. There he was beaten again, and by some accounts castrated, before being
hung from the trestle. A note was pinned on him written in red crayon reading, “Others Take Notice. First and Last Warning,” and including the initials of several other IWW men
and strike leaders. The note was signed 3-7-77, the code used
by the Virginia City Vigilance Committee
more than four decades earlier.
The event was staged to look like it was the spontaneous act of outraged citizens
acting in a time honored Western
tradition. Local police made no attempt to locate or identify the masked men and
no charges were ever brought. There is, however, considerable circumstantial evidence that the lynching was the well planned work of the Pinkertons at
the bidding of the Copper barons and
that the motive was not patriotism
but as Big Bill Haywood said, “…because there is a strike in Butte, and he was
helping to win it.”
Frank Little's death mask. |
It turned out that Ralph Chaplin’s predictions were to come
true. After Little’s murder Montana declared martial law in Butte. Union
leaders and “traitors” were rounded up and arrested. Both the strike
and the IWW local were smashed.
And that was just the harbinger of sweeping action against
the IWW and its leadership across the
country. Halls were raided, including the IWW General Headquarters in Chicago,
which was ransacked. IWW newspapers
and pamphlets were banned from the mails.
Foreign born members were seized
and deported under the infamous Alien Acts, the legacy of John Adams’s long past crusade against the Jeffersonian Republican enemies.
Frank Little open and defiant anti-war stance was controversial even in the radical union. But that was just an excuse to justify his murder. It was his war on capitalism that got him killed. |
After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia,
which IWW leaders like Heywood openly
admired, a Red Scare carried the
repression on even after the war. In
1919 101 IWW leaders were arrested and
charged with sedition in Chicago
and another 40 at Leavenworth, Kansas. That included virtually the entire leadership of the union including Haywood and
Chaplain. Heywood would notoriously skip bond and go to the Soviet Union to avoid trial, for which old
time Wobblies never forgave him.
Chaplain, who had foreseen it all,
was among those who spent years behind
bars.
Great analysis and read. A brief fyi, Frank left Oklahoma in 1900, following his brother Fred, a seasoned miner, to California. There Frank became a hard rock miner. He moved to Bisbee in 1903. Jane Little Botkin
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