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

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) formed in 1905 to give voice to revolutionary syndicalism and, above all else, to organize the supposedly unorganizable. The IWW maintained a loose organizational hierarchy between the national offices in Chicago and locals spread across the United States. It soon had branches in Canada, Mexico, and many far-flung places around the world. This structure elevated individual loca organizers from a remarkable range of ethnic and racial diversity. In the western Unitec States, Frank Little rose to prominence as one of the most important regional organizers. Jane Little Botkin tells Frank Little's story by digging into IWW collections, loca archives, and a collection of family documents and remembrances that are beyond the reach of other historians because she is one of Little's descendants. The book is both a family history and an important regional study of the IWW divided into three parts covering Little's early life in Oklahoma, his entry into labor organizing and the IWW, and the World War I period that saw him lynched in Butte, Montana, in 1917.

The book's first contribution is to clear up over a century of confusion aboui Frank Little's heritage. Frank Little personally cultivated the untruth that he was a "half breed" Indian. The only supporting evidence for his Native American ancestry come; from a relative who claimed that Frank's mother Almira was "'one-half Indian, a Cherokee' and ashamed of her Indian blood, and that she chose not to enroll despite her children's urging" (26). Many Anglos have imagined Native ancestry, which forces cautior when evaluating Little's claims. Botkin clearly documents that the Little family experienced Oklahoma as white settlers, living illegally for over four years in what was then Indian Territory before the federal government opened the so-called Unassigned Land to white appropriation in 1889. Frank grew up in Oklahoma and attended a Quakei school—though his family was not Quaker—alongside Anglo and Native American children. Casting Little's origin myth aside, he seemed to draw from his early years to thrive while immersed in racially diverse western towns organizing for the IWW.

In the following chapters the author traces the course of Frank Little's life after hi left home, giving us a remarkably detailed view of many of the most significant regiona labor struggles in this period as well as the spaces in between. Botkin's research uncovered the years Frank and his older brother Fred spent engaged in mining, first in Colorado, then in California and Arizona. By taking an individual and his family as hei subject, rather than constructing a narrative around notable events, Botkin reveals, foi example, life and work in Cripple Creek, Colorado, between its two major labor conflict: in 1893—94 and 1903. Fred moved to the remote Colorado mining town after the firs strike and met his soon-to-be-wife Emma. Fred and Emma went on to play importan and largely neglected roles in the IWW, intellectually influencing Frank in his formative years.

Frank joined the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) after he followed Fred to California, then spent about year in Bisbee, Arizona, beginning in 1903. He also became a socialist, and spoke in other Arizona mining towns—places like Miami, Globe, Douglass, Clifton-Morenci, and Jerome—before the founding of the IWW. Unfortunately, Botkin's study mostly follows the older historiography of the IWW in the US West in depicting the IWW as a white organization dominated by miners. An important exception is her discussion of Little and Fernando Velarde organizing for the WFM and IWW in Clifton in 1906. Velarde was one of the region's most prominent Mexican organizers during these years, working tirelessly for other organizations including the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). The pair organized over two hundred predominantly Mexican workers during this trip. Botkin argued that WFM...