Frank Little and the IWW: The Blood That Stained an American Family by Jane Little Botkin (review)

Those familiar with the arc of labour history in the American West know the story of Frank Little well. He was the famous (and infamous) Industrial Workers of the World (iww) agitator who crisscrossed the region on behalf of radical labour and ultimately met his death under a railroad trestle in Butte, Montana - lynched there in the early hours of 1 August 1917. His murder's legacy lives on not just in labour lore but beyond (for example, the note that vigilantes left on his body included the inscription "3-777," which today is included in the crest of the Montana Highway Patrol, for them a modern symbol of law enforcement). In Frank Little and the iww Jane Little Botkin revisits Little's story and give us a long overdue comprehensive look at an underappreciated but woefully important figure in working-class history.

Botkin, a great grand-niece of Little's, set out to tell the famous labour martyr's story in part because of this family connection and the years of family history -and mystery - that surrounded him. The book intends to be a "chronicle of ordinary Americans who did extraordinary things" within the context of a turbulent time in American history. (xviii)

Indeed, the work is an episodic look at the moments and the places where Little made his mark. Botkin starts at the end, and recounts Frank Little's last moments, when he was abducted from his Butte hotel room, the tragic moment that would make his name famous for generations. After this quick retelling, readers are dropped into Little's life and activism at a number of sites during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The story begins with Frank's upbringing in Oklahoma, where his family participated in the famed 1889 land runs. The young Little witnessed right away the power of ethnic and class distinctions and marginalization, particularly with American Indians in the Territory. The Little family even had outlaw connections prior to their time in Oklahoma, evidenced by a perhaps curiously included chapter that steps back to their run-ins with the Doolin-Dalton Gang. The family's labour connections in some ways began with Frank's older brother Fred and his wife Emma in Cripple Creek, Colorado, in 1893-1894, where they started lifelong commitments to organizing, although sometimes with less efficacy and more relationship turbulence, we later find out, than the more famous family member.

Frank Little appears in earnest in Part II of the book, beginning with his sometimes uncertain working-class life (Botkin, perhaps because of lack of sources, is forced to say that he "could have," "might" and "perhaps" often about where he worked or lived). Still, we know that he made it to Bisbee, Arizona Territory beginning in 1903 and embarked on a career of organizing. Around this time, he became a member of the Western Federation of Miners and the Socialist Party of America, soon giving May Day speeches in Globe, organizing Mexican mine labour in Clifton, working on behalf of the free speech movement in Missoula, Spokane, San Diego, and Fresno, where he was arrested five times during what the author calls his "defining chapter." (169) Just as in Fresno, Little's work landed him in jails across the West and on several occasions left him beaten and scarred.

As Botkin makes plain, he had undoubtedly committed himself to his life's work: an ideology and organizing of radical industrial unionism. His grass-roots organizing efforts for iww locals bore fruit, and his notoriety among Wobblies swelled, placing him on the General Executive Board in 1911. Little would participate in union work in fights in Kansas City and Drumright, too, leaving him "well known in the world of labor by 1914." (215)

By 1914, for many parts of the labour community and those like Little on the political Left, World War I proved a significant challenge to their...