Western Federation of Miners
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The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) was a radical labor union that gained a reputation for militancy in the mine fields of the western United States. Its efforts to organize both hard rock miners and smelter workers in the Western Rocky Mountains states brought it into sharp conflicts – and often pitched battles – with both employers and governmental authorities. It also played a key role in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, but left the group several years later.
It changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers in 1916. After a period of decline it revived in the early days of the New Deal and helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935. It was later expelled from the CIO during the post-war red scare in 1950 for refusing to shed its communist leadership. After fighting off efforts by the United Steelworkers of America to raid its membership for years it eventually merged with it in 1967.
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Founding and early history
The WFM was created in 1893 by the merger of several miners' unions representing copper miners from Butte, Montana, silver and lead miners from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, gold miners from Colorado and hard rock miners from South Dakota, and Utah. The miners who formed the union had already experienced a number of hard-fought battles with mine owners and governmental authorities: in the Coeur d'Alene strike in 1892, after company guards shot five strikers to death, the miners disarmed the guards and marched more than a hundred strikebreakers out of town. In response Governor N.B. Willey asked for federal troops to restore order; President Harrison sent General J.M. Schofield, who declared martial law, arrested 600 strikers and then held them without the right to trial, bail or notice of the charges against them in a stockade prison. Schofield went on to order local mine owners to discharge any union members they had rehired.
This level of violence continued in later strikes. At Cripple Creek, Colorado, after mine owners increased the working day from eight hours to ten, miners dynamited mine buildings and equipment. Further violence was averted by the owners' agreement to return to the eight hour day and improve miners' pay to three dollars a day – the standard that the union fought for across the west from that point forward. That success enabled the WFM to expand dramatically over the next decade, to the point where it had over two hundred locals in thirteen states.
Organizing the industry
The WFM affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in 1896, but withdrew the following year. It attempted to create its own alternative to the AFL, the Western Labor Union, which would begin organizing all workers in the West by organizing the smelter workers who handled the ore that the WFM's members mined.
That plan to organize the mill workers led to even fiercer battles with the refinery companies, who paid their workers half what miners earned for a ten to twelve hour day. When smelter workers went on strike in Colorado City, Colorado in 1903 it appeared that they might be able to win their demands without a serious fight, since the Cripple Creek miners were striking in sympathy with their demands. However, when one of the smelter operators refused to accept the deal brokered by the Governor of Colorado, James Hamilton Peabody, the Governor called in federal troops.
Peabody was a fierce opponent of unions and of any social legislation that limited businesses' right to run their own affairs as they saw fit. The crucial issue in Colorado was the eight hour day. When the Legislature had enacted a statute limiting the workday in hazardous industries, such as mining and smelting, to eight hours, the Colorado Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. The voters of Colorado then passed a constitutional amendment authorizing the eight hour day, but the smelter owners and Republican Party fought any efforts to pass a new statute implementing the amendment, while Peabody declared that he would undo it "if it requires the entire power of the State and the Nation to do it".
That power took the form of Colorado's National Guard, whose salaries were paid by the business community, not the State. Their commanding officer, General Sherman Bell, began arresting union leaders, strikers, and local public officials by the hundreds. Bell prohibited local newspapers from printing any material unfavorable to the military and ordered the arrest of the entire staff of a newspaper whose editorial had offended him. In Bell's words, "Military necessity recognizes no laws, either civil or social". When a lawyer for the union sought to free the prisoners on a writ of habeas corpus, Bell responded "Habeas corpus, be damned! We'll give 'em post mortems!"
The violence on both sides only intensified. After a mine explosion on November 21, 1903 killed a superintendent and foreman, Bell announced a vagrancy order that required all strikers to return to work or be deported from the district. When a bomb exploded at a train station in Independence, Colorado on June 6, 1904, killing thirteen strikebreakers, employer militias and vigilantes destroyed every union hall in the area, while General Bell deported hundreds of strikers. Although the courts eventually acquitted all union members charged with the bombing of the station and awarded damages to those who had been deported, the strike and the union were broken in Cripple Creek; similar measures in Telluride, Colorado effectively drove the WFM out of the state.
Founding the IWW
The WFM's defeat led the union to look for allies in the battle, which it was not prepared to concede, with employers in the Rockies. The Western Labor Union had renamed itself the American Labor Union in 1902. The WFM now sought to join with other advocates of industrial unionism and socialism to found a national union federation, the Industrial Workers of the World, in 1905.
The WFM had adopted a socialist program in 1901. "Big Bill" Haywood, who joined the union as a silver miner in Idaho, put the union's objections to capitalism in the simplest terms: he took the side of workers against the mine owners who "do not find the gold, they do not mine the gold, they do not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belongs to them".
Haywood was the first chairman of the IWW; he defined its work as "socialism with its working clothes on". But factional differences the following year between the "revolutionists" and "reformists" within the IWW, which also divided the leadership of the WFM, led to the departure of the WFM from the IWW in 1907. The WFM rejoined the AFL in 1911.
Trial of Haywood, Pettibone and Moyer
When Frank Steunenberg, a former governor of Idaho, was murdered on December 30, 1905, the authorities arrested Charles Moyer, president of the union, Bill Haywood, its secretary, and George Pettibone, a former member, in Colorado and put them on trial for Steunenberg's murder. The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Harry Orchard, who claimed that the union had directed him to plant the bombs that killed supervisors and strikebreakers during the second Cripple Creek strike and that Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone had hired him to assassinate Governor Steunenberg.
The prosecution had depended heavily on the investigative work of James McParland, who had helped convict the Molly Maguires as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency three decades earlier, and felt confident that it would convict all three. The defense hired Clarence Darrow, the most renowned lawyer of the day, who had represented Eugene V. Debs several years earlier. After a two and a half month trial the jury acquitted all three defendants.
Mine Mill
The failure of later strikes and the depression of 1914 brought about a sharp decline in the WFM's membership. In 1916 the union changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. The union was largely ineffective, riddled with members who passed information on to their employers, and unable to win substantial gains for its members for most of the next two decades.
Things changed, however, in 1934 when miners and smeltermen revitalized the union. Returning to its militant roots, the union obtained spread throughout the west from its base in Butte, and then into the South and Canada. The union was one of the original members of the Committee for Industrial Organizing, which later transformed itself into the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
The union also returned to its radical political traditions as well, as members of the Communist Party USA came to hold the presidency of the union in the late 1940s. That, however, also sparked further disagreements over leadership and expenditures and, as the postwar red scare picked up momentum, prompted raids by the United Steelworkers of America, the United Auto Workers and other unions, particularly in mining in the South, where the CIO encouraged predominantly white miners' locals to defect. The CIO formally expelled it in 1950 after it refused to remove its left leaders.
The union soldiered on for another seventeen years, finding itself increasingly outmatched in its battles with employers. While it defeated all of the Steelworkers' efforts to replace it in its western strongholds in the 1950s, it had a harder time holding on to its outposts in the South. In addition, more conservative members, uneasy with the union's foreign policy and with the increasing number of African-American and Mexican-American unionists, tried to take their locals out of the union, opening up fissures that weakened the union's strikes against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1954 and 1959. The union eventually merged with the Steelworkers in 1967 after losing locals to it in Butte and Canada. Many of its former Canadian locals eventually affiliated with the Canadian Auto Workers.
Salt of the Earth
The 1954 movie Salt of the Earth, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, a member of the Hollywood Ten, portrays a year and a half long strike by New Mexico zinc miners who belonged to Mine, Mill; many of the actors were rank-and-file members of that union. The producers found it difficult, however, to recruit Anglo actors to play strikebreakers or deputy sheriffs; those who disliked the union wanted nothing to do with it, while those who sympathized did not want to be seen switching sides, even as actors.
The movie's star, Rosaura Revueltas, was deported during the shooting of the film, requiring the producers to use a double in some scenes and to shoot others and record her narration in Mexico. The home of one of the union members/actors and the union hall were burned down shortly after the end of shooting. Clifford Jencks, the Mine, Mill organizer depicted in the film, was shortly thereafter convicted of falsely stating that he was not a communist on the affidavit required of all union representatives under the Taft-Hartley Act; his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in Jencks v. United States, Template:Ussc.
The producers were unable to find a post-production house in Hollywood willing to process the film or skilled editors willing to work on it, other than under pseudonyms or at night. The film was shown at only a few theaters; most theaters rejected it, including some that had originally agreed to show it, and union projectionists refused to show it at some of those that had accepted it.
See also
External Sources
- "Instead of Fighting the Common Enemy": Mine Mill versus the Steelworkers in Montana, 1950-1967 by Laurie Mercier (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0348/is_4_40/ai_58397917)
Further Reading
The WFM
"The Labor Wars, From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns" by Sidney Lens ISBN 0385005008
"Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America" by J. Anthony Lukas ISBN 0684846179.
Mine Mill
"Salt of the Earth" screenplay by Michael Wilson, commentary by Deborah Rosenfelt ISBN 0912670452
"The CIO 1935-1955" by Robert H. Zieger ISBN 0807821829