1913 was a hard year on the Copper Range of Michigan.
By December, a worker’s strike against the copper mines was in its 5th
month and faltering. The great Calumet & Hecla Mining Company refused to negotiate
with the Western Federation of Miners and many strikers returned to work or
left the range. The dispute was as always and is still today: the right of
working folk to determine the value of their labor versus the right of Capital
to determine what return on their investment is acceptable.
Then as now technology played a critical role. A one man drill was
introduced to replace the old drill, which required two men to operate. For
labor that meant harder work for fewer workers. To the Company it meant increased
productivity and greater profit. All too familiar lines were clearly drawn.
On Christmas Eve, the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Union held a Christmas Party
for strikers and their families on the 2nd floor of Calumet’s
Italian Hall. Much of what happened that night remains in question.
Perhaps as many as 500 people gathered in the hall. The celebration was
barely begun when person or persons unknown yelled “Fire!” Panic ensued. The single
stairway down to street level quickly filled with the dead and dying. Some say the doors at the bottom of the stairs opened only inward, which apparently isn't true. Some say they were held closed. There was no fire.
No one can say for certain how many people died that night, crushed to
death by friends and family in a narrow stairwell. Most victims were Finns.
Most were women and children. Christmas morning, a local Finnish newspaper put
the number at 80 dead, all told.
What’s indisputable is that the worst disaster of its kind in Michigan
history was the direct result of a bitter dispute that set neighbor against
neighbor over the harvest of copper and it occurred on Christmas Eve.
A funeral procession was held. An inquest during which folk who didn’t
speak English were forced to answer questions in English proved inconclusive.
No one was ever charged. Recriminations followed and however faint, those echo across
the region even now.
The strike of 1913-1914 ended in April of ’14, with only 2,500 of the estimated
original 9,000 members of the Western Federation of Miners left to vote on the
referendum to call off the strike. Little was gained and much was lost. The
town of Calumet never fully recovered and the Italian Hall was torn down in
1984. By all reports, it didn’t fall easily.
*
The good citizens of Michigan receive near to nothing in exchange for
their precious resources. If you think Capital pays good value in cash to any
community for their irreplaceable wealth, you should think again. What jobs are
created last only so long as the resource lasts and that’s rarely very long.
Then jobs and the capital to fund them and the resource from which both flow
are forever gone.
Always some few hardy people stay, drawn to a land by false promise and
remaining for reasons of their own. Some stay for love of place and they put
down permanent roots spread wide over hard rock.
What’s true is this: American resources belong to American people
before corporations and jobs alone are insufficient to buy them. If the harvest
of our resources can’t be made to profit workers and Capital alike, if wealth created
from our resources can’t be kept in the communities that earn it and the
exhaustion of the resource means the exhaustion of the community, then those
resources ought remain untapped until such time as a wiser, more just people
can work out better means.
Until we determine what a land and its people are worth when measured
in copper or iron or oil or water, we sell our resources and us blindly and our
children’s future entirely too cheap.
Because what’s indisputable is that the world and we are one beneath
the heavens.
Or at least on Christmas, we’re encouraged to hope and entitled to
dream…
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