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n 239 Conclusion After the great struggle to organize the Copper Country was over, there was time to pause and consider the effects the 1913–14 Michigan Copper Strike had on Michigan and America. Perhaps the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, the journal for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, which ran articles about the strike, put the strike in the most appropriate perspective. The newspaper argued that if the Citizens’ Alliance was allowed to persist in its “insane attitude” and break the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), it would not stop until it successfully drove “union labor forever out of the copper country.”1 The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine’s prediction proved all too prescient, as employers used their victory in the strike to their advantage, greatly impeding the Copper Country’s labor movement, depriving the region’s workers of union representation and a voice on the job. By April 1914, the Copper Country WFM had been destroyed, its leading activists were blacklisted by the region’s mine companies, and all union members were forced to turn in their union cards to gain employment in the mines. That their defeat was the product of coercion rather than consent, and that it came at the hands of better-organized, better-financed, and more powerful interests than their own, surely made little difference to the defeated strike force. 240 n Conclusion This major setback for the Copper Country’s labor movement was one illustration of the lasting significance of the great strike, but what elevates the strike to the level of national significance are several of its other leading features. This book was written partly in the hopes of thrusting the strike and its participants into the national spotlight. To be sure, several of the strike’s key elements—the antilabor violence, the collective efforts of employers to break the strike, and the leading role of southern and eastern European immigrants—were shared by other prominent labor conflicts of the Progressive era. But much about the 1913–14 strike remains unique. First, and ultimately most important, the Italian Hall tragedy occurred during and because of the strike. Even in the unlikely event that no one yelled “Fire!” and the deaths were nothing more than tragic accidents, those deaths would not have occurred without the strike. Moreover, while the victims of the tragedy came from different ethnic and age groups, all of the people who died in Italian Hall were members of the working class, and thus, as was true of most deaths that came during strikes, employers and their surrogates kept themselves and their families free from the bloodshed. Victims’ families, strikers, and much of the nation’s labor movement remembered the Christmas Eve disaster as an act of class violence. That the historian Arthur Thurner dismissed these views as little more than “a legend” is evidence that even in writing labor history, workers’ voices are too often marginalized in favor of those from other social groups.2 Of course, the Italian Hall tragedy left scars throughout the Copper Country. The land, the mines, and the people all had their own scars and tales to tell. In time, some of the bitterness faded away as life in the Copper Country moved on, snowy winter after snowy winter, boom cycle after bust in the copper industry. Some scars, though, lasted a lifetime, as was the case with Melba Luoma, who was in Italian Hall that fateful night. Remembering her friend more than ninety years later, Lillian Gow stated of Luoma: “She lived the rest of her life with a great, big, black and blue mark on her arm. She was crushed, underneath this pile. . . . I suppose, all that pressure, and she carried that (mark) all her life.”3 The strike also bankrupted the WFM, and the Copper Country mineworkers’ defeat dramatically weakened that union. While damaging any institution that serves to increase the power of the marginalized in relation to the powerful is to be mourned, the damage done to the WFM and the end of that union’s history in the Copper Country were exceptional tragedies. The WFM was the institution of choice for tens of thousands of America’s most militant and most lionized workers, the hard-rock miners of the American West. After 1916, the WFM changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, a union with an impressive history of its own. But the union was never the same. After all, how...

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