3-7-77

Last night, I watched An Injury to One, a bold documentary by Travis Wilkerson, on the lynching of IWW organizer Frank Little. But it doesn't stop there---Wilkerson draws parallels between Little's assassination and the later economic slow demise of Butte, Montana, the rewriting of the Sedition Act for union-busting purposes, the subsequent Palmer Raids and McCarthyism, and corporate rape and destruction of the environment.

Frank Little was quite a character; one of the Old Guard of the IWW, he hopped freights across the nation to organize and agitate for the working class. Proud to be half-cherokee, he would brag of being a "real american", a "real Red", and would joke, "the rest of you are immigrants." He was in the thick of the free-speech fights that raged across the West and Midwest from 1910-1913, but he was no fool---James Cannon, in his Notebook of an Agitator, was impressed with Little's ability, while in a Peoria, IL jail cell during the strike and free speech movement there, to defuse the unfocused anger of a young man who just wanted to get out and fight. He carried a quietude and authority with him, earned by long years on the labor battlefront. He served 30 days on the rockpile in Spokane for publically reading the Declaration of Independence. During the ore-docks strike in Duluth and Superior, after he had been kidnapped and held under armed guard while strikebreaking thugs broke up worker meetings, he led Cannon on a walk down to the docks. The hired guns of the company were all about, but he insisted that the walk was necessary "to show the gunmen that we aren't afraid of them, and also to show the strikers that we're not afraid, so that they won't be afraid." Far from a "swivel-chair" leader, he was in the trenches---literally, when in Iron River, Michigan, he was found beaten and unconscious with a rope around his neck. That happened a year before his coming to Butte.

Butte had formerly been a union mining town, but years of struggle, including martial law, had broken the movement. After the Speculator Mine explosion of June 8, 1917, when 168 miners were gassed and burned alive, trapped behind bulkheads cemented to save the company money, interest in unionism was renewed. Frank Little heeded the call. He was all activist, blasting company greed and WWI in the same fiery speeches. "Either we're for this capital slaughterfest, or we're against it---I'm ready to face a firing squad rather than compromise." Novelist Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective (translation: company thug) for Anaconda in Butte claimed to have been offered $5000 to kill Frank Little and turned it down. Someone took it.

On August 1, 1917, Frank Little's body was found hung from a railroad trestle, the note "3-7-77" pinned to him---the legal dimensions of a Montana grave; 3' wide, 7' long, 77" deep. Over 8000 people attended his funeral; still the largest in the history of Butte.

The Anaconda Mining Company was extracting 10% of the world's copper from Butte during WWI, and the mortality rate for miners was greater than that of the soldiers in Europe's trenches. It is estimated that at least $25 billion in copper has been extracted from Butte's mines. Now all that is left is the Berkeley Pit, the largest Superfund site in the United States. Locals keep their eyes on the Pit, a deep and highly toxic sinkhole of acid in the center of town. Efforts are undertaken to discourage migratory birds from landing there after hundreds of Canada geese, looking for a safe place to land before a storm, chose the Pit as their spot. Their skin and feathers were burned off from the acidic "Lake Berkeley"; with open lesions and esophageal corrosion resulting in death. A new term arose to describe it; "pit effect". The Berkeley Pit has been proposed as the nation's first National Environmental Disaster Monument.

Anyway, An Injury to One will be playing again on Saturday, and throughout the month. For more info on modern Butte, you can't beat this article from William Langewiesche in The Atlantic. And film and/or labor history buffs will recognize that Will Oldham, contributor to the soundtrack, was the teenage preacher in John Sayle's film, Matewan.