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π 105 C H A P T E R 6 The 1913–14 Copper Country Strike The 1913–14 Strike was the culmination of all previous socialistunionist Finnish immigrant activities, and in a way Finnish immigrant socialistunionists were spoiling for a confrontation with the mining companies. While the strike became a district-wide action throughout the Copper Country, strike organizers focused attempts on confronting the paternalism and oligarchy of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company (C&H) and to a lesser extent the Quincy and Copper Range mining companies. The strike was at times open class warfare and as in any such conflict, the strike had its casualties. The strike also dramatically polarized the Copper Country. The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) printed its own newspaper from the Työmies Publishing Company building while copper companies printed their version of events in newspapers ostensibly controlled by the mining oligarchy. Not surprisingly, the two sides of the dialectic often had their own interpretations of strike events. Rhetoric came fast and furious from both sides, but in the following two chapters, we will look particularly at the strike from the perspective of organized labor, and specifically from the viewpoint of striking Finnish immigrant socialistunionists . This specific perspective, the socialist-unionist Finnish immigrants’, 106 π chapter six has thus far eluded books that deal solely with events from the 1913–14 Copper Strike. Original primary research on Finnish immigrant socialist-unionist organizations in the Copper Country and Työmies are scant in Arthur Thurner’s work and completely lacking in recent research on the Italian Hall by author Steve Lehto; neither author even lists Työmies in their bibliography even though Työmies published a number of English language articles about strike events. The oversights in primary research of the Finnish proletarian perspective by Lehto and Thurner are regrettable because Finnish immigrants played a major role in this, the most significant of all conflicts between labor and capital in the Copper Country. This gap in original primary research leads to incomplete analysis of significant events (such as the Italian Hall tragedy), and in some instances, inaccuracy and neglect in examination of the complete historic record. In the next two chapters, we will outline early labor activities in the Copper Country via historiography and then examine the contribution of Finnish immigrant socialist-unionists in the effort to organize Copper Country workers before and during the calamitous 1913–14 Michigan Copper Strike. We will evaluate many of the strike’s events in two unique ways. First, we will use the writing of Työmies Publishing Company editor Antti O. Sarell to interpret the actions of striking workers from the perspective of a Työmies Publishing Company staff member.1 Sarell’s viewpoint will afford us the chance to view the strike through a unique lens, that of the Finnish immigrant socialist-unionists. Secondly, we will use banner headlines and articles from Työmies and its English-language counterpart, the Miners’ Bulletin, to give a chronological sequence to the strike’s major occurrences. In essence, these chapters are a look at the strike through the lens of the Finnish immigrant socialist-unionists and the WFM. We will also use primary and secondary sources and oral histories to give context and complete the story of the 1913–14 Michigan Copper Miners’ Strike. Early Labor Unrest The 1913–14 Copper Country Strike was a monumental showdown between monopoly capital and labor (represented by the WFM), but this strike certainly was not the first labor grievance issued by Copper Country mineworkers. The 1913–14 Copper Country Strike π 107 Though some have portrayed the Copper Country as a peaceful backwater of labor-management relations, it was not such a serene setting. Localized histories such as mining-company historian C. Harry Benedict’s Red Metal: The Calumet and Hecla Story, travel-writer Angus Murdoch’s Boom Copper: The Story of the First U.S. Mining Boom, and even one-time history professor, at DePaul University, Arthur Thurner’s Rebels on the Range: The Michigan Copper Miners’ Strike of 1913–1914 have either neglected or blatantly refused to address the Copper Country’s working class on its own terms, in essence embezzling labor’s ownership of its own history on the Keweenaw Peninsula. While Benedict and Murdoch rarely bring labor into the industrial equation of the Copper Country’s labor-management calculus, throughout his writing Thurner downplays the early efforts of labor organizers in the Copper Country and attributes strike...

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