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n 167 CHAPTER 8 Tragedy One little girl who was jammed in the hallway in a dying condition begged one of her rescuers to save her. She grasped his hand, kissed it, then her little head dropped upon her breast and she was dead. —Miners’ Bulletin, December 28, 1913 The 1913–14 Copper Country Strike was a bitter conflict between the burgeoning strength of organized labor and the entrenched power of American industrial capital. Like many of the bloody labor conflicts that came before, there were casualties in the Copper Country: Alois “Louie” Tijan and Steve Putrich gave their lives and became martyrs to the cause, while Margaret Fazekas came within an inch of martyrdom. The strike caused bloody class conflict in many cases, but one event more than any other has come to symbolize the acute bitterness present in the Copper Country during the 1913–14 Copper Country Strike: the Italian Hall tragedy. Built in 1908, the Italian Hall was designed to be a showpiece for the Copper Country’s Italian population. Though two other wooden balloon-frame Italian Halls preceded this building on almost the same site, this pressed brick structure was built to last. The hall consisted of three floors, and had a roof covered with a fireproof 168 n Chapter 8 material. In addition to the fireproof roofing material, the Calumet News reported on the building’s opening in October of 1908, that “particular attention has been paid to the safety of the public in the design of the building and in addition to the ample main stairway a large iron fire escape has been erected on the side of the building [and] also one from the stage, both of these are built into the solid brick walls, all doors open outward.” The newspaper also described the important extras of the building’s exterior: “The front is trimmed with sandstone and the cornice work is of heavy Galvanized iron.” The building’s interior was just as ornate. Especially fancy were the auditorium hall, stage, and balcony. According to the Calumet News, the auditorium was “forty feet wide by seventy one feet in length with an eighteen foot ceiling, finished in Georgia pine, maple flooring, and a highly ornamental steel ceiling”; the stage’s “proscenium arch was eleven feet by twenty two feet”; and the balcony “was ten feet wide by sixty feet long, well trimmed with a neat balustrade and ornamental columns.”1 After reading the Calumet News’ glowing report on the construction and design of the hall, few could have imagined that some five years later the Italian Hall would be the site of one of the nation’s greatest tragedies. On Christmas Eve of 1913, at a party for striking mineworkers’ children sponsored by the Calumet Women’s Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), disaster struck. The Christmas Eve party at the Italian Hall was supposed to be a chance for the children of strikers to be “kids” again in the war-torn Copper Country, if only for a short time. After the distribution of presents, funded in part by the WFM national and in part by donations procured by the Calumet Women’s Auxiliary, there was to be a Mother Goose–style play that evening. That all turned tragic in a few short moments. A call of “Fire!,” a panicked exodus from the second-floor hall, and an unparalleled loss of life all changed the tenor and tone of the 1913–14 Michigan Copper Strike. The Italian Hall tragedy came to signify the depths of the accrued acrimony in the Copper Country. In many ways, the human element has been assigned much of the blame for the loss of between 73 and 79 lives in the Italian Hall. This chapter probes the role people played in this tragedy, but the design of the building itself can also assist in explaining some of the reasons for the terrible loss of life. A primary problem was that an estimated 400 to 500 people were squeezed into a 40-by-71-foot social hall.2 Even though most accounts concur that as the evening wore on the crowd in the opposite: This drawing of the Italian Hall’s first floor shows the large storefront windows of Vairo’s Saloon and the A&P. The first floor was commercial space, while upper floors were halls or dwellings. Drawings of the three floors of the Italian Hall by Gary Kaunonen, based on Kevin Harrington’s...

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