REMEMBERING THE WESTERN WOBBLIES -- AND THE LYNCHING OF FRANK LITTLE (CHEROKEE)

No matter where and what I've taught, formally and informally, I've always managed somehow and some way to bring in such key and critical topics as Labor,  Native Americans, and the Civil Rights Movement -- and, in all of those dimensions, the challenges faced and the urgent need for effective social justice grassroots organizing.  Much of this is sadly absent from conventional -- orthodox -- teaching at all academic levels.   (We all had a great Labor class at Tougaloo College and put much of that to good use in the Movement.)  (H)



INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD



The famous LITTLE RED SONG BOOK of the   thoroughly indigenous Industrial Workers of the World -- the Wobblies.  It's subtitled, appropriately, "Songs To Fan The Flames Of Discontent."         

The IWW was founded in 1905, primarily through the efforts of the radical, frontier hard-rock (metal)  miners' union -- the Western Federation of Miners and its vigorous, visionary leadership:  William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, Vincent St. John, Father Thomas Hagerty and many, many others.   Its  philosophy, almost from the outset, came to be a uniquely frontier American variety of syndicalism -- the primacy of democratic revolutionary unions in effecting systemic change and administering the new cooperative society.  In a very real sense, the IWW was the first homegrown American  revolutionary movement since 1775:   fearless, hard-driving, visionary -- and the epitome of  grassroots democracy reaching out to all workers, unskilled as well as skilled, regardless of race or ethnicity or gender.  One of its major spokespersons and organizers  was Frank H. Little, born of a "Quaker father" and a Cherokee Indian mother, in Indian Territory in 1879, a metal miner who became chairman of the General Executive Board of the IWW and was lynched at Butte on August 1 1917 by thugs employed by Anaconda Copper. 

The lynching of Frank Little was in the context of very widespread, prolonged, and extraordinarily bloody and brutal repression levied against the IWW by company gunmen, state and local "lawmen," vigilantes, and then increasingly by the Federal Government.  This was strike-breaking and union-busting wrapped up in the hypocritical cloth of a phony World War I "patriotism."

Frank Little's murder was preceded, for example, by the "Loyalty League" deportation of almost 100 Wobbly  copper strike activists at  the rugged mountain town of Jerome, Arizona (southwest of Flagstaff) on July 10 1917.  They were dumped in the California desert without food or water and were  next  forced back into Arizona at gun-point by a California sheriff's posse --  and then imprisoned at Prescott, Arizona.  This operation was directed by the United Verde Copper Company.  On July 12, at Bisbee, Arizona (on the Mexican border), a very large, so-called "Loyalty League" rounded up 1200 IWW-led copper strikers (not counting three that they killed), loaded them onto cattle cars, and dumped them into the desert near Columbus, New Mexico, without food or water.  All of this was carried out under the direction of the Phelps-Dodge Copper Corporation.

All of these events and others are still very much a part of the living,  blood-dimmed  legacy of labor relations in the Western hard-rock mining industry -- an industry characterized consistently by the utter recalcitrance of the mine owners and managers.

One of Frank Little's closest friends was Ralph H. Chaplin, IWW editor and poet and author of the primary American labor anthem, "Solidarity Forever."  In his memoir, Wobbly: The Rough and Tumble Story of an American Radical  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948),   Chaplin recounts his last visit with Frank Little during an IWW General Executive Board meeting at Chicago that fateful summer of 1917:

"Frank Little was the first to arrive.   This time he was on crutches.  One leg was in a plaster cast.  There had been an automobile accident in Jerome, Arizona, where he had been directing I.W.W. organization in the copper mines of the Southwest.  But Frank wore his Stetson at the same jaunty angle, and his twisted grin was as aggressive as ever. . .Frank was leaving that day for Butte, Montana, to direct the organizational drive on Anaconda Hill.  I marveled at his courage at taking on a difficult and dangerous assignment like that in his present condition.

"It's a fine specimen the I.W.W. is sending into that tough town," I chided him.  "One leg, one eye, two crutches -- and no brains!"

Frank laughed.  He lifted a crutch as though to crown me with it. "Don't worry, fellow-worker, all we're going to need from now on is guts."

That was the last time I saw Frank Little alive."

In a long and stirring memorial poem always contained in the editions of the old-time Wobblies' Red Song Books, Phillips Russell  concluded:

"...We'll remember you, Frank Little!

The papers said:  "So far as known, 

He made no outcry."

No, not you!  Half Indian, half white man,

All I.W.W.

You'd have died a thousand deaths

Before you'd have cried aloud

Or whimpered once to let them 

enjoy your pain.

My youngest son, Peter, a born newspaperman, was running the Anaconda MT
office of the Butte-based Montana Standard a few years ago.  Thanks to him I
have a copy of Frank Little's death certificate issued by Silver Bow County.
Among other things, it notes his age [38], his birthplace [Oklahoma],
occupation [Labor Organizer], and cause of death:  "Strangulation from
Hanging. Homicidal". The document indicates that the personal information
was provided by the Miners Union, Butte.

Thanks also to Pete, I have a copy of the August 2 edition of The Butte
Miner.  Its front page, framed in glass, hangs now on our dining room wall.
And here are some of the things it told its world on the  very grim morn of
August 2, 1917:

ARMED VIGILANTES LYNCH I.W.W. LEADER [Big, banner headline]

Frank Little, First Lieutenant Of W.D. Haywood, Surprised And Overpowered In
His Room And Hanged From Trestle On Outskirts Of The City

File photo of Frank Little [wearing his Stetson]

LITTLE'S DEATH CAUSES GRIEF TO I.W.W. OFFICER
[W.D. Haywood says victim of vigilantes was an earnest and active worker in
the interests of the laborer.]

FIVE OF SEVEN MEN WHO FORMED LYNCHING PARTY ARE KNOWN, SAYS LAWYER

MAYOR AFTER THE LYNCHERS

ACT BRANDED AS DEVILISH

Miners Tobacco Fund


LAST WIRE FLASHES

Leadville Strike Over
I.W.W.s to Work in Montana and North and South Dakota [harvest stiffs]
Miners Will Be Protected [Lt. Colonel George P. White on protecting scabs in
the Globe/Miami (Arizona) Copper District]

Frank Little's funeral at Butte was the largest ever held in Montana.  I
have a photo of the funeral procession which is eerily similar to ours in
Jackson in June, '63 when 6,000 of us marched in 102 degree heat through the
city -- in Mississippi's first "legal" civil rights march in history --
immediately following the massive funeral of murdered Medgar Evers on Lynch
Street.

No one was ever arrested for Frank Little's murder -- nor was anyone
punished for their role in kidnapping and killing and deporting  striking
miners at Jerome and Bisbee. All of the perpetrators were well known.



HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

See the new and expanded/updated edition of my "Organizer's 
Book." It's the inside story of the massive Jackson Movement,
bloody repression and murder, and more -- including a myriad
of organizing "lessons."  And with my new and 10,000 word
Introduction. http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm (". .a local activist's
 important account of the deleterious effects the involvement of 
national organizations can have on indigenous protest movements."
David Garrow in "The Age of the Unheralded", Progressive Magazine,
April 1990.

See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE:
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded in 2012. Photos. Material on our Native
background.)