Western Federation of Miners
Its efforts to organize both hard rock miners and smelter workers brought it into sharp conflicts – and often pitched battles – with both employers and governmental authorities.
The Mine Mill union was expelled from the CIO in 1950 during the post-war red scare for refusing to shed its Communist leadership.
[1] Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin have written, The Western Federation of Miners was frontier unionism, the organization of workers who had become "wage slaves" of mining corporations rather recently acquired by back-east absentee ownership.
[The WFM] had the militancy of the undisciplined recruits ... From the founding of the Western Federation in 1893, its story for twelve years is that of a continuous search for solidarity ...[2]The miners who formed the union had already experienced a number of hard-fought battles with mine owners and governmental authorities: in the Coeur d'Alene strike in February 1892, after company guards shot five strikers to death, the miners disarmed the guards and marched more than a hundred strikebreakers out of town.
Willey asked for federal troops to restore order; President Benjamin Harrison sent General John Schofield, who declared martial law, arrested 600 strikers and then held them in a stockade prison without the right to trial, bail or habeas corpus.
The profitable Bunker Hill Mining Company at Wardner, Idaho[15] fired seventeen workers believed to be union members.
[16] At Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg's request, President William McKinley sent the military to indiscriminately round up 1,000 men and put them into bullpens.
[17] Emma Langdon, a union sympathizer, charged in a 1908 book that Governor Steunenberg deposited $35,000 into his bank account within a week after troops arrived in the Coeur d'Alene district, implying that there may have been a bribe from the mine operators.
[19]Idaho miners were held for "months of imprisonment in the 'bull-pen' — a structure unfit to house cattle – enclosed in a high barbed-wire fence.
[22] At their 1901 convention the WFM miners agreed to the proclamation that a "complete revolution of social and economic conditions" was "the only salvation of the working classes.
When the legislature had enacted a statute limiting the workday in hazardous industries, such as mining and smelting, to eight hours, the Colorado Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.
[citation needed] That power took the form of Colorado's National Guard, whose salaries were paid by the business community, not the State.
Their commanding officer, General Sherman Bell, began arresting union leaders, strikers, and local public officials by the hundreds.
After a mine explosion on November 21, 1903 killed a superintendent and foreman, Bell announced a vagrancy order that required all strikers to return to work or be deported from the district.
When a bomb exploded at the Independence Depot near Victor, Colorado on June 6, 1904, killing thirteen strikebreakers, Sheriff H.M. Robertson went to investigate.
A short time later Sheriff Robertson, whom the Mine Owner's Association deemed too tolerant of the union, was confronted and ordered to resign immediately or be lynched.
In a hostile environment ripe for provocation, the Mine Owner's Association and the Citizens' Alliance called a public meeting in a vacant lot across from the Western Federation of Miners union hall in Victor.
Vigilantes subsequently destroyed every union hall in the area, while General Bell used the National Guard to deport hundreds of strikers.
In July 1913, locals of the Western Federation of Miners called a general strike against all mines in the Michigan Copper Country.
[28] On Christmas Eve 1913, the Western Federation of Miners organized a party for strikers and their families at the Italian Benevolent Society hall in Calumet.
In 1914, the copper miners at Butte, Montana, split between those loyal to the WFM, and those supporting more militancy, many of whom sympathized with the more radical Industrial Workers of the World.
The WFM's defeat led it to look for allies in the battle with employers in the Rockies, a struggle the union didn't want to concede.
The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Harry Orchard, who claimed that the union had directed him to plant the bombs that killed supervisors and strikebreakers during the second Cripple Creek strike and that Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone had hired him to assassinate Governor Steunenberg.
McParland persuaded Orchard that he could avoid the gallows if he testified that an "inner circle" of Western Federation of Miners leaders had ordered the crime.
[30] Upon hearing of this circumstance, president Theodore Roosevelt issued a particularly stern rebuke to Idaho Governor Frank Gooding, describing such a state of affairs as the "grossest impropriety": If the Governor or the other officials of Idaho accept a cent from the operators or from any other capitalist with any reference, direct or indirect, to this prosecution, they would forfeit the respect of every good citizen and I should personally feel that they had committed a real crime.
[32] Governor Gooding's response to the President provided a severely distorted account of the financial arrangements for the trial, and a promise to return money contributed by the mine owners.
Gooding then: ...kept the narrowest construction of his promise to the president... [He then proclaimed publicly and often that] no dollar has been or will be supplied from any private source or organization whatsoever, [and then] went right on taking money from the mine owners.
[35] The defense hired Clarence Darrow, the most renowned lawyer of the day, who had represented Eugene V. Debs several years earlier.
In spite of the combined efforts of state and local governments in Idaho and Colorado, the Mine Owners' Associations, the Pinkerton and Thiel Detective Agencies, and other interested industrialists, the jury acquitted Bill Haywood.
The producers were unable to find a post-production house in Hollywood willing to process the film or skilled editors willing to work on it, other than under pseudonyms or at night.
