Community in Conflict: A Working-class History of the 1913-14 Michigan Copper Strike and the Italian Hall Tragedy

Preface

n vii Preface While much of the Copper Country’s tradition celebrates the sheer enormity and progress of the area’s halcyon copper days and the men who drew enormous profits from the industry, there was the “little” discrepancy: thousands of mineworkers were the ones who actually worked to produce all this wealth. The mineworkers who ate, caroused, lived, worked, were injured, and died underground often do not receive the credit due for their contributions to building the lore, traditions, and wealth of this industrial area. This book works to tell a different story, not of progress and wealth, but of reality for Copper Country wageworkers before and during the great upheaval of the 1913–14 Michigan Copper Strike. Rather than paying tribute to the so-called Copper Kings who reaped enormous profits because of their ownership of the mines, this book is a labor history of the 1913–14 strike told from the perspective of the working people of the Copper Country. We seek to chronicle the men and women who produced the wealth (both material and otherwise) of the region and their efforts to find a voice through labor organizations, political parties, and ethnic associations that sought to change their material existence. In short, this book strives to recount the class struggles viii n Preface waged in pursuit of industrial democracy in the face of exploitation by the kings of Michigan copper. As a labor history, this book begins with the understanding that class struggle is inherent in capitalist societies. Workers are locked in a perpetual struggle with their employers, one in which both sides seek to gain at the other’s expense. In other words, workers desire the full fruits of their labor, while employers want to have a free hand to extract as much wealth as possible. As such, this book takes into serious consideration overt forms of class conflict, such as strikes, sabotage, and picket line violence, as well as the more hidden forms of class conflict, including political corruption, struggles over “space” within the community, and the so-called industrial accidents that then, as now, are “accidents” experienced mostly, if not only, by members of the working class. Drawing inspiration from the New Labor History and E. P. Thompson’s “bottom up” approach, Community in Conflict places working people and their experiences at the center of Copper Country history. Throughout the text we analyze a wide range of working-class activity, including working-class politics, unionization, strikes, and material culture. Of course, class was not the only source of division among the Copper Country’s residents. The region’s working people were themselves fragmented by gender, race, ethnicity, skill, religion, and political beliefs, and many of the “workers’ institutions” such as craft unions were comprised almost entirely of white men who labored in skilled trades. But rather than focusing on working-class fragmentation, Community in Conflict seeks to highlight examples of labor solidarity in Michigan’s copper range, particularly those moments when class experiences and class-based activism overcame traditional divisions within the working class. Such was the case in 1913 when Copper Country workers—men and women, skilled and unskilled, and drawn from numerous ethnic groups—combined and confronted the equally unified group of Copper Country employers. Other books, such as Arthur Thurner’s Rebels on the Range, have told the history of the strike largely from the employers’ perspective. Thurner relies on accounts from newspapers that the Copper Country strikers would have termed the “kept press.” By privileging one viewpoint, that of the mine owners, Thurner’s works presents a misleading view of the strike, one that ignores the perspective of the working people responsible for making the strike. Community in Conflict, however, seeks to shed light on the strike from the often-overlooked viewpoint of those who sought better wage and working conditions in area mines; those seeking to put more food on the family table; and yes, even those revolutionaries who sought to subvert the capitalist system. It is this perspective, the viewpoint of working people, unionists, radicals, and revolutionaries, which is most often ignored or marginalized in standard histories such as Thurner’s Rebels on the Range. This is regrettable because historical events Preface n ix are often presented in a top-down form that rewards the wealthy few with leading roles in the historical narrative. Thus, in its own way, the writing of history is itself a class struggle, and...