Western Federation of Miners famous flyer entitled "Is Colorado in America?"
The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) was a radical labor union that
gained a reputation for militancy in the mines of the western United States and British Columbia. 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. One of the most dramatic of these struggles occurred in the Cripple Creek district in 1903-05, and has
been called the Colorado Labor Wars. The WFM also played a key role in the founding
of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, but left the group
several years later.
It changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (more familiarly referred to as Mine
Mill) in 1916. After a period of decline it revived in the early days of the New Deal and
helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935. The
Mine Mill union was expelled from the CIO during the post-war red scare in 1950 for refusing
to shed its communist leadership. After spending years fighting off efforts by the United
Steelworkers of America (USWA) to raid its membership, Mine Mill and the USWA merged in 1967.
Founding and early history
The WFM was created in 1893 by the merger of several miners' unions representing copper miners from Butte, Montana, silver and lead miners from Coeur d'Alene,
Idaho, gold miners from Colorado and hard rock miners from South Dakota, and Utah.
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. They built their union when they were not yet "broken in"
to the discipline of business management. [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...[1]
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 1892, after company guards
shot five strikers to death, the miners disarmed the guards and marched more than a hundred strikebreakers out of town. In
response Governor N.B. Willey asked for federal troops to restore order; President
Harrison sent General J.M. Schofield, who declared martial law, arrested 600 strikers
and then held them without the right to trial, bail or notice of the charges against them in a stockade prison. Schofield went on
to order local mine owners to discharge any union members they had rehired.
This level of violence continued in later strikes. At Cripple Creek,
Colorado, after mine owners increased the working day from eight hours to ten, miners dynamited mine buildings and
equipment. Further violence was averted by the owners' agreement to return to the eight hour day and improve miners' pay to three
dollars a day – the standard that the union fought for across the west from that point forward. That success enabled the WFM to
expand dramatically over the next decade, to the point where it had over two hundred locals in thirteen states.
Organizing the industry
The WFM affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in 1896, but
WFM delegates came away from the AFL convention in Cinncinnati,
...not only disappointed with the refusal to aid their big fight in Leadville, but with a feeling that they had not been
associating with union men, or with men possessing the moral or intellectual fibre ever to become good union men.[2]
The WFM withdrew from the AFL the following year, and attempted to create its own alternative to the AFL, the Western Labor Union, which would begin organizing all workers in the West, starting with the smelter
workers who handled the ore that the WFM's members mined.
That plan to organize the mill workers led to even fiercer battles with the refinery companies, who paid their workers half
what miners earned for a ten to twelve hour day. When smelter workers went on strike in Colorado City, Colorado in 1903 it appeared that they might be able to win their demands
without a serious fight, since the Cripple Creek miners were striking in sympathy with
their demands. However, when one of the smelter operators refused to accept the deal brokered by the Governor of Colorado,
James Hamilton Peabody, the Governor called in federal troops.
Peabody was a fierce opponent of unions and of any social legislation that limited businesses' right to run their own affairs
as they saw fit. The crucial issue in Colorado was the eight hour day. 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. The voters of Colorado then passed a referendum authorizing the eight hour
day, but the smelter owners and Republican Party fought any efforts to
pass a new statute implementing the amendment, while Peabody declared that he would undo it "if it requires the entire power of
the State and the Nation to do it".
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. Bell prohibited local
newspapers from printing any material unfavorable to the military and ordered the arrest of the entire staff of a newspaper whose
editorial had offended him. In Bell's words, "Military necessity recognizes no laws, either civil or social". When a lawyer for
the union sought to free the prisoners on a writ of habeas corpus, Bell responded "Habeas corpus, be damned! We'll give 'em post
mortems!"
The violence on both sides only intensified. 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 a train station in Independence, Colorado on June 6, 1904, killing
thirteen strikebreakers, Sheriff H.M. Robertson went to investigate. The situation became very volatile, with throngs of angry
men gathered in the streets.
The Cripple Creek Mine Owners' Association and an anti-union vigilante
organization, the Cripple Creek District Citizen's Alliance, called a meeting at Victor,
Colorado's Military Club to formulate a response to the violence. 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. Robertson
was replaced with Edward Bell, a member of both the Mine Owner's Association and the Citizen's Alliance.
In a hostile environment ripe for provocation, the Mine Owner's Association and the Citizen's Alliance called a public meeting
in a vacant lot across from the Western Federation of Miners union
hall in Victor. Speeches against the union gave way to arguments, followed by fist fights and shooting. Two were killed
and five others were wounded in the melee.
WFM members took refuge in their hall, but Company L of the National Guard surrounded the hall and laid siege, firing into the
building from nearby rooftops. Forty union members eventually surrendered, with four of them sporting fresh wounds. The Citizen's
Alliance entered the building and trashed it. Vigilantes subsequently destroyed every union hall in the area, while General Bell
used the National Guard to deport hundreds of strikers. General Bell closed the Portland Mine, owned by James Burns, because it
had come to an agreement with the WFM.
Although the courts eventually acquitted all union members charged with the bombing of the railroad station and awarded
damages to those who had been deported, the strike and the union were broken in Cripple Creek; similar measures in
Telluride, Colorado effectively drove the WFM out of the state.
Founding the IWW
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 Western Labor Union had renamed itself the American Labor Union in
1902. The WFM now sought to join with other advocates of industrial unionism and
socialism to found a national union federation, the Industrial Workers of the World, in 1905.
The WFM had adopted a socialist program in 1901. "Big Bill" Haywood, who joined the
union as a silver miner in Idaho, put the union's objections to capitalism in the simplest terms: he took the side of workers against the mine owners who "do not find the
gold, they do not mine the gold, they do not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belongs to them".
Haywood was the first chairman of the IWW; he defined its work as "socialism with its working clothes on". But factional
differences the following year between the "revolutionists" and "reformists" within the IWW, which also divided the leadership of
the WFM, led to the departure of the WFM from the IWW in 1907. The WFM rejoined the AFL in 1911.
Trial of Haywood, Pettibone and Moyer
When Frank Steunenberg, a former governor of Idaho,
was murdered on December 30, 1905, the authorities arrested
Charles Moyer, president of the union, Bill Haywood,
its secretary, and George Pettibone, a former member, in Colorado and put them on trial
for Steunenberg's murder. 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.
The prosecution had depended heavily on the investigative work of James McParland
who, acting as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, had helped convict the Molly Maguires three decades earlier, and felt confident that it would convict all three. The defense
hired Clarence Darrow, the most renowned lawyer of the day, who had represented
Eugene V. Debs several years earlier. After a two and a half month trial the jury
acquitted Bill Haywood, and after Pettibone was also acquitted early the next year, all charges against Moyer were dropped. In a
separate prosecution, Orchard received a death sentence which was commuted to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in
1954.
Mine Mill
The failure of later strikes and the depression of 1914 brought about a sharp decline in the WFM's membership. In 1916 the
union changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. The union was largely ineffective,
riddled with members who passed information on to their employers, and unable to win substantial gains for its members for most
of the next two decades.
Things changed, however, in 1934 when miners and smeltermen revitalized the union. Returning to its militant roots, the union
spread throughout the west from its base in Butte, and then into the South and Canada. There were
also union locals in non-ferrous smelters in New Jersey, both in Perth Amboy at the American Smelting and Refining Comapany
(ASARCO) and in Carteret at the U.S. Metals Company. The union was one of the original members of the Committee for Industrial
Organizing, which later transformed itself into the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
The union also returned to its radical political traditions as well, as members of the Communist Party USA came to hold the presidency of the union in the late 1940s. That, however, also
sparked further disagreements over leadership and expenditures and, as the postwar red scare
picked up momentum, prompted raids by the United Steelworkers of America, the
United Auto Workers and other unions, particularly in mining in the South, where the
CIO encouraged predominantly white miners' locals to defect. The CIO formally expelled it in 1950 after it refused to remove its
left leaders.
The union soldiered on for another seventeen years, finding itself increasingly outmatched in its battles with employers.
While it defeated all of the Steelworkers' efforts to replace it in its western strongholds in the 1950s, it had a harder time
holding on to its outposts in the South. In addition, more conservative members, uneasy with the union's foreign policy and with
the increasing number of African-American and Mexican-American unionists, tried to take their locals out of the union, opening up fissures that
weakened the union's strikes against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1954 and
1959. The union eventually merged with the Steelworkers in 1967 after losing locals to it in Butte and Canada. Many of its former Canadian locals eventually affiliated with the Canadian Auto Workers.
Salt of the Earth
The 1954 movie Salt of the Earth, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, a member of the Hollywood Ten,
portrays a year and a half long strike by New Mexico zinc
miners who belonged to Mine, Mill; many of the actors were rank-and-file members of that union. The producers found it difficult,
however, to recruit Anglo actors to play strikebreakers or deputy sheriffs; those who disliked the union wanted nothing to do
with it, while those who sympathized did not want to be seen switching sides, even as actors.
The movie's star, Rosaura Revueltas, was deported during the shooting of the film,
requiring the producers to use a double in some scenes and to shoot others and record her narration in Mexico. The home of one of the union members/actors and the union hall were burned down shortly after the end of
shooting. Clifford Jencks, the Mine, Mill organizer depicted in the film, was shortly thereafter convicted of falsely stating
that he was not a communist on the affidavit required of all union representatives under the Taft-Hartley Act; his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in Jencks
v. United States, 353 U.S. 657 (1957).
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. The film was shown at only a few theaters; most theaters rejected it, including some that had
originally agreed to show it, and union projectionists refused to show it at some of those that had accepted it.
See also
External sources
Further reading
The WFM
- "The Labor Wars, From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns" by Sidney Lens ISBN 0-385-00500-8
- "Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America" by J. Anthony Lukas ISBN
0-684-84617-9.
Mine Mill
- "Salt of the Earth" screenplay by Michael Wilson, commentary by Deborah
Rosenfelt ISBN 0-912670-45-2
- "The CIO 1935-1955" by Robert H. Zieger ISBN 0-8078-2182-9
References
- ^ The IWW: Its First Seventy Years, Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin,
1976, page 9 ppbk.
- ^ The IWW: Its First Seventy Years, Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin,
1976, page 10 ppbk.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
