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n 135 CHAPTER 7 Company They chased the strikers far and wide, and all were surprised that the strikers were such good runners. Quite a number of them were caught, but we thought it was useless to arrest them, and some of them were made fit subjects for the hospital—in fact, they were very roughly treated. —Charles Lawton, general manager of the Quincy Mining Company, describing a December 12, 1913, police break-up of a peaceful strike parade on Quincy Hill It was rigged. It was all rigged. The entire Keweenaw Peninsula was bought and sold a long time before anyone with a red Western Federation of Miners (WFM) card stepped onto the Keweenaw’s copper-rich ground. Documentary evidence demonstrates that from the gerrymandering of local elections, to the thumbs-up or thumbs-down of naturalization decisions by mine managers, to the December 1913 campaign of violence orchestrated by mining companies and the procompany Citizens’ Alliance, the strategy and tactics to “rid the Copper Country of the WFM and its foreign agitators” were a brutal but well-orchestrated presentation of mining company power and manipulation of local politics, press, and peacekeeping forces. 136 n Chapter 7 The struggle to organize Copper Country workers into a collective body was an uphill battle. Copper Country mining companies and the men who ran them had unfettered, unregulated, covert, and even overt influence on the cultural, economic, and social actions of the land they “ruled.” Living in palatial homes, as Quincy’s Charles Lawton did on the top of a hill overlooking a feudal-like kingdom, the barons of the Copper Country were checked only by their own scruples. James MacNaughton, the general manager of Calumet & Hecla (C&H), described by Finnish immigrant reporter Antti Sarell as “the emperor of the Copper Country” and by the newspaper Työmies as the Tsaari, or czar, of the copper territory,1 ran Michigan’s Copper Country like an isolated fiefdom. However, this allusion in the Finnish immigrant press to a monarchical system in the Copper Country just scratched the surface of the power mining companies exerted during the strike. While copper companies initially attempted to ignore the strike and go about the business of mining, there was a certain fight, persistence, and pride in the WFM’s rank and file that would not go away. It was only after months, and when there was no end to the strike in sight, that copper mine managers began to take the strike seriously. In some instances it was too late for the copper barons to reverse the advances of the WFM; to many supporters of organized labor it appeared that the WFM was winning, and at the very least those with anti-labor sentiments would begrudgingly admit that the WFM was holding its own. There seemed to be a real chance that the Copper Country could become WFM territory. However, in December, after a cold winter should have broken the strike (the mining companies were depending on this), area copper bosses and their supporters resorted to using two time-tested techniques to break the strike: intimidation and violence. These were the last, desperate tactics in a mining company strategy to control the maximum amount of power on a finger of land that was a protected bastion of wealth for a few, but the site of a daily struggle for many. Company Strategy Copper Country mining companies and the men who ran them used proven techniques to combat the influence and gains by the WFM during the strike. Control of the media, establishment of a citizens’ vigilante group, hiring of strikebreakers and scabs, and intimidation and violence were all old tricks that management had at its disposal. C&H and “Big Jim” MacNaughton were especially adept at breaking strikes. In fact, many of the Copper Country mining companies looked to C&H and “Big Jim” for direction, recognizing that, given its size and resources as a company, C&H would lead in this time of tumult.2 Company n 137 Short of actually beating, shooting, and shipping WFM officers out of the Copper Country (which the Citizens’ Alliance eventually did after the Italian Hall tragedy), the copper companies’ main strategy during the early stages of the strike was to ignore the WFM and try to go about the business of copper mining as best they could. The general idea with this strategy was to let the carefully crafted oligarchy, which included control of Houghton County political offices, law enforcement, and legal authorities...

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