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n 1 Introduction In many ways, the Copper Country was a typical late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century American mining region with disputes between labor and management that every so often climaxed in a divisive labor strike. Atypical, however, was one specific event in the Copper Country’s history—the Italian Hall tragedy in Calumet, Michigan, on Christmas Eve in 1913. That night, during a holiday party organized for the strikers’ children, someone yelled “Fire!” in a crowded labor hall, and the party’s attendees rushed toward the front door to escape the fire they believed had started in the hall. Before they could exit Italian Hall, many tripped and fell, causing others to trip over recently fallen bodies. Those who fell were crushed by those who tripped over them, until the entire stairway was blocked by a pile of injured, dead, and dying victims. The results were as horrible as any in the history of American labor: between seventy-three and seventy-nine persons were killed, the overwhelming majority of whom were children. An English-language article in Työmies, a Finnish immigrant socialist newspaper based in Hancock, Michigan, expressed disbelief at the sheer scale of the tragedy: “The most appalling disaster in the history of Michigan occurred 2 n Introduction last evening at the Italian Hall in Calumet where hundreds of men, women, and children had gathered to witness Christmas exercises for the strikers’ children.”1 As a horrible keystone event of the 1913–14 Michigan Copper Strike, the Italian Hall tragedy was a macabre exclamation point on an especially violent time in American labor history. The perils of striking workers in an ethnic hall near Lake Superior became etched on the national consciousness like the rough, sunken death dates “Dec. 24, 1913” on the headstones of those in Calumet’s Lake View Cemetery who died in the panic. While the terrible events of the Italian Hall tragedy made their mark in national news at that time, they have come to be an everlasting, almost haunting reminder of the strike’s violent past in the collective historical memory of the entire Copper Country. Dreadfully, Calumet and Michigan’s Copper Country became famous for something else besides the red metal mineral being mined thousands of feet underground. Though this memory faded over the years, the personal and social scars caused by this tragedy were deep enough to inspire a national treasure to put pen to paper in an effort to compel workers almost thirty years later to fight for a better life. Events in Calumet, Michigan, became the focus of a moving 1940s labor song: Take a trip with me in nineteen thirteen To Calumet, Michigan, in the copper country I’ll take you to a place called Italian Hall And the miners are having their big Christmas ball . . . Such a terrible sight I never did see We carried our children back up to their tree The scabs outside still laughed at their spree And the children that died there was seventy-three The piano played a slow funeral tune, And the town was lit up by a cold Christmas moon The parents, they cried and the men, they moaned, See what your greed for money has done?2 Above are the first and last two stanzas from Woody Guthrie’s nearly forgotten labor song “1913 Massacre.” Guthrie is an American icon. His classic “This Land Is Your Land” is sung in elementary schools across the nation, but why might Guthrie be interested in an Italian fraternal hall in a place called Calumet, Michigan? Expressed through Guthrie’s lyrics are the anger, pain, sorrow, and tragedy of this heartbreaking event. Though Guthrie penned the song in the mid-1940s reportedly after reading a Introduction n 3 chapter entitled “Calumet and Ludlow: Massacre of the Innocents,” in Mother Bloor’s We Are Many, the song provided a memorial to people who died three decades earlier. Guthrie’s song is not an especially accurate portrayal of events at Italian Hall; rather, Guthrie’s memorial to those who died at Italian Hall was a call to action for those seeking social justice and union representation in the 1940s. To inspire the men and women engaged in these struggles, Guthrie wrote and performed a song about an event in American labor history that happened in a place called Calumet, which recalled a labor strike and human tragedy of national significance. Despite the national significance of the Italian Hall tragedy, writing...

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