Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,000

For this very special grave post, I am going to profile one of the greats. This is the grave of Frank Little.

Like a couple of other recent posts, I have something already written on Little. When I wrote Organizing America, I based some chapters on grave posts I had written. Then I filled the gaps. One of the gaps was Clara Lemlich, who I profiled recently. Another was Little. So I am going to publish the original submission of the Little chapter (which was heavily edited later of course) because it’s far easier to copy and paste it than any of the final PDF versions that I have. So you get footnotes and the whole thing. What’s better to celebrate the most ridiculous and yet serious historical series in the history of the internet than some footnotes of a real warrior for justice? Also, this has to be longest even semi-scholarly series in the entire history of the internet. 2,000 grave posts, most of which reasonably thorough discussions of their life and legacy. It’s a big part of my life and whatever passes for a legacy! Anyway…..

Organizing America does not always mean you win. Sometimes, it means suffering. It means standing up for your beliefs in the face of massive hostility. You might spend your whole life losing. You might get beat up. Sometimes, you pay the ultimate price: death.

We should not romanticize martyrdom. There’s nothing good about dying a violent death. But we can learn from our martyrs, such as how maintain bravery and principle in the face of tremendous suffering. We can also learn how to sustain consistency when we cannot compromise with evil. There can be a time and a place for compromise. But when the enemy of justice wants to crush you completely, that is the time to stand up for justice no matter what happens. At least, the future will remember you as a hero and organize from your life and martyrdom.

This leads us to the life of Frank Little.

Born in 1879 in Oklahoma, Little came from a Quaker family. They participated in the settler colonialist land thefts of Oklahoma, then called Indian Territory. Although he later claimed to have Cherokee blood, this is probably untrue, even as many histories of him have called him Native American. The family identified as white and were in Oklahoma Territory illegally upon Little’s birth. Then, in 1889, the U.S. passed a law opening up two million acres of Indian Territory to white settlers. They lined up on the day the land opened. Whites rushed across the border and took the best land based on who could get there first.[1]

Like most of the white newcomers to Oklahoma, the Littles the new land did not make them rich. Frank’s father died in 1899. Little soon followed his brother Fred out to the California mines. Fred had already started organizing his fellow workers into unions and influenced his little brother. Frank worked the mines for a few years and then in 1903 went to Bisbee, Arizona, the copper mining capital of the Southwest and a place that would later have a huge impact on both Little’s life and American labor history. He got a job and joined the Western Federation of Miners.[2]

Miners labored in often brutal conditions. Dangerous work existed throughout the United States in the early twentieth century, but mining work had extreme risks. Workers breathed in poisonous dust. Mines could cave in on them. Coal was the worst, but even the hard rock mines where Little labored killed workers. At best, workers came out of the mines every day exhausted and filthy. It was no good way to live.[3] The isolation of the job made things even harder. Whichever capitalist grabbed access to the metal ruled these camps. The rich believed they had the right—God given no less—to run their economic affairs any way they chose. Moreover, they believed that no matter how much pain and suffering and death it caused. In the mines, it caused a lot of that pain, suffering, and death. Many of the nation’s most infamous and despised capitalists came out of mining, such as Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie in the eastern coal mines and the steel mills they used that coal to feed.[4]

In 1892, after a brutal miners’ strike, which ended with the miners blowing up a mine and then the Idaho governor declared martial law and banned the union, miners throughout the West formed the Western Federation of Miners. The WFM believed that only by unionizing all the mines—industrial unionism—could workers succeed. This was still a radical idea in 1893. That they came to this idea at the same time as Eugene Debs should not surprise us. Finally, American workers realized that capitalism would not work for them. But the question of industrial versus craft unionism remained divisive for decades, dividing the working class between unions who saw the world in very different ways.[5]

The WFM’s industrial unionism claimed that all miners had common interests, no matter what job they held in the mining industry. This became the precursor to mass organizing in the workplace and it proved attractive to workers such as Little who saw injustice in the world and wanted to revolt against it. In 1894, the WFM won a huge victory at Cripple Creek, Colorado, one of the main mine districts in the West. Soon the new union had 28,000 members and until 1903 it dominated the Colorado mines, providing one of the strongest unions American workers had in this era.[6]

Little joined the WFM shortly after he arrived in the West. He soon became not only a WFM member but an organizer. This was his first major organizing experience. We do not know that many details about his daily activities, but we do know he proved effective and gained the respect of miners. Historians rely on records—written or otherwise—to study the past. Workers often do not write down what they do every day. The same is true of other oppressed groups. So the records don’t answer all the questions we would like to know about Little. Little did not long enough to write his memoirs. When he was alive, he was too busy organizing for revolutionary change to bother with thinking about his legacy. We do know that in 1906, Little spoke at the annual May Day parade in the mining town of Globe, Arizona and became a desired speaker at union events in the region.[7]  

In 1905, the Western Federation of Miners helped create the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW gathered radicals from around the nation to form an alternative to the craft unionism of the era. Over time, it developed an ideology of forming all workers into one big union that would organize a general strike that would bring down capitalism and create the workers’ revolution. More concretely, the IWW called for worker activism at the point of production, creating power to move the revolution toward beginning. Over the next fifteen years, it provided the most important framework American radicalism had ever seen. The WFM would not stay in the IWW for very long; different leadership took it back to its western roots.[8] But Little found the IWW’s mission irresistible. He broke with the WFM at its 1907 convention, when he loudly proclaimed himself for IWW principles and the WFM leadership expelled him for it. Again, infighting always plagues the left because people hold different principles that can change over time.[9]

Little had learning to do, like the rest of us. In 1907, he spoke to Mexican miners in Clifton-Morenci, Arizona. He told them that he knew what was best for them, giving them what he called “fatherly advice.” Even radical unionists often treated Mexican workers as children. The Mexicans promptly evicted him from their meeting, noting they could conduct their own business and make their own decisions. Racism is not something we can just say we reject. We have to work to reject it and learn from our mistakes. It must be a lifelong struggle.[10]

In 1909, Little went to Missoula, Montana, getting involved in that city’s Free Speech Fight. These were struggles across the American West where the IWW demanded that cities follow the Constitution and allow them access to public speaking. Literally getting on a soapbox and preaching to the public about the need for revolution should be protected by the First Amendment. However, the Constitution only applies if authorities permit it to be applied, as the experience of African-Americans in Jim Crow America could attest, where the states ratified the Fifteenth Amendment granting Black men the right to vote and the South completely ignored it for decades. In towns such as Missoula, the Constitution did not apply either. The authorities arrested Wobbly (a common nickname for IWW members) speakers and threw them in jail. The IWW’s strategy was to flood the prisons and force the city to take on a huge expense holding and feeding them while attracting more Wobblies to the cities to show they could not be intimidated. Usually it worked, though often at great physical cost to the men who were involved. Little spoke out for freedom and was sentenced to jail for it. It would not be the last time.[11]

After Missoula, Little went to Spokane, Washington, where another free speech fight took place. Little received a thirty-day sentence for daring to the read the Declaration of Independence in a public place. The Spokane police enjoyed torturing the imprisoned Wobblies. They routinely beat up the prisoners, used fire houses on them in the cold Northwestern winter, placed them in overcrowded prisons, withheld their food, and sprayed steam on them in what they called the “hotbox.” They tortured Little this way too. Guards tried to force him to work on a rock pile. Little refused. So, they housed him in an unheated school for the month he was in prison, in addition to the other tortures.[12]

We cannot overstate Little’s bravery. He wasn’t a big guy and he wasn’t that strong. But he was brave. None of this broke Little’s spirit. That evidently was unbreakable. He immediately threw himself to another free speech fight, this time in Fresno, California. Over the next few years, he would help lead free speech fights in at least four other places: San Diego, Kansas City, Peoria, Illinois; and Webb City, Missouri, a mining town in the southwest part of that state. In each, he faced the same violent cops and torture in prison.[13]

Little became perhaps the IWW’s most effective organizer. He would go anywhere, under any conditions, to push forward the worker struggle. This meant putting his life on the line, again and again. In 1913, he went to the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, assisting in a copper workers strike. He was kidnapped, taken out of town, and held at gunpoint. Upon hearing this, the striking workers engaged in a dramatic rescue effort and got him back.[14]

In 1914, Little won a spot on the IWW’s Executive Committee, a sign of the respect he had earned through his organizing. Five IWW Executive Committee members, including Little, had only one eye, including its leader Big Bill Haywood. Missing eyes can help us understand why workers would listen to Little’s revolutionary message. Take the example of the auto worker Charles Weaver. In 1906, Weaver had lost an eye while working in a dye factory. Despite his disability, he had to take care of himself. The nation had no social safety net for injured workers. So in 1913, while working in an auto plant, he lost the other eye when a crowbar struck it. In the meantime, workers compensation laws had begun, but Weaver’s employer successfully reduced its obligation to a tiny portion of what Weaver needed to survive because it had only cost him the one eye, not both. While we know nothing of Weaver’s politics, one can see why one-eyed workers might join the IWW. All capitalism had done for them is disable them.[15]

The arrests, the beatings, the torture, none of this stopped Little’s organizing. In 1916, back in Duluth, Little and other IWW organizers were arrested for murders they did not commit. The organizers won their release, but the rank and file workers received twenty-year prison terms. Shortly after his release, Little went to northern Michigan to assist striking iron miners. fighting for decent wages and working conditions. Employers had him arrested, beaten, tied up, and then they acted like they would lynch him, tying a rope around his neck. They did let him go, but it was a premonition of what would come the next year for him.[16]

When the U.S. joined World War I in 1917, the IWW leadership feared the government would use its radicalism as an excuse to crack down upon it. There was good reason to feel that way. President Wilson would bring organized labor into his administration in an unprecedented way during the war, but only what he considered “respectable” labor. That meant the largely non-political craft unions of the American Federation of Labor.[17] But the IWW and other radicals on the other hand, people who called for a full-fledged transformation of the American system? They deserved the iron hand of government repression, according to Wilson and his allies. Understanding this, IWW head Big Bill Haywood was reluctant to take an open stance against the war. He feared that by doing so, the government would just destroy his union.[18]

Haywood’s equivocation outraged Little. He believed in standing up for revolution, regardless of the consequences. He also rightfully knew that equivocation would not get in the way of repression of radicals. He demanded a full denunciation of World War I as a capitalist murder of the world’s workers. Most of the IWW leadership simply felt the union wasn’t strong enough to resist the government on the war. Instead, IWW leadership told workers to judge the war for themselves and make their decision based on their conscious. This betrayed Little’s sharply felt sense of what was right. He told his IWW colleagues, “Either we’re for this capitalistic slaughterfest or we’re against it. I’m ready to face a firing squad rather than compromise. I’d rather take a firing squad”[19] There’s no question that he meant it too. He may have feared dying, but also knew death in the service of the working class was likely.

Little went back on the road to keep organizing. If he couldn’t convince Haywood and his other comrades to resist the war, at least he could keep pushing workers toward revolutionary change. He went to Bisbee, Arizona. The copper companies totally controlled Bisbee. Phelps-Dodge would go on to be the largest copper company in the world. Workers faced terrible conditions, both inside and outside the mines. The mines had enormous safety problems. Worker housing was dilapidated. Remembered miner Fred Watson, “It was a pretty tough town. The conditions in the mines were intolerable. Absolutely. They never mentioned anything the miners asked for. Their demands were never mentioned.”[20]

The IWW had special appeal to members of the West’s mining, logging, and agricultural camps. These were workers really at the bottom of the social order, despised as they traveled around the country, often hoboing on the trains. The union’s anti-racist statements, even if individual white Wobblies often ignored this part of the union’s ideology, attracted Black, Mexican, and even Chinese and Japanese workers. Fighting white supremacy made it an even bigger threat to the social order. Rooted primarily in masculine spaces of the train and the camp, the IWW in the West largely built on an ideal of working class manhood standing up to oppression in the open spaces of the West. This was just the kind of atmosphere where Little felt at home.[21]

There were different unions in Bisbee. Many of the white miners joined an American Federation of Labor-affiliated union. Many of the Mexicans and some of the eastern Europeans joined the IWW. In May 1917, the AFL union called a strike and the IWW agreed to join it. Within a few days, 85 percent of workers struck. They wanted better working and living conditions, an end to blasting while workers were in mine, a pay raise, and for companies to not put union workers on a blacklist. Little helped them build these demands, organize the workers, and move the struggle forward. He even led a meeting with the governor of Arizona to urge him to mediate the conflict.[22]

The IWW gained its top demands on pay in June. Shortly after, trying to escape what he feared was a potential lynching from the copper industry, he got in a car with some allies. The car wrecked and Little broke his ankle. He spent ten days in the hospital, limping out of Bisbee in early July. A few days later, Phelps-Dodge ordered the infamous Bisbee Deportation, where the forces of order rounded up anyone they thought was a Wobbly, mostly any Mexican miner they found, put them on a train, and dropped them in the middle of the desert on the New Mexico border in the heat of summer. The Bisbee Deportation became one of the most infamous violations of civil and labor rights in American history. Newspapers in Bisbee claimed all the strikers were pro-German and wanted to destroy the nation’s war effort, an absurd claim but one that proved Little’s that the government would not equivocate in destroying the union regardless of what stance IWW leadership took.[23]

Little headed from Bisbee to Butte, Montana. He was a physically broken man. The years of jumping on and off moving trains to travel, all the beatings, all the torture, a serious hernia, the broken ankle. But his heart remained as strong as ever. Just before he went to Butte, the IWW propagandist Ralph Chaplin, who in 1915 wrote the legendary labor song “Solidarity Forever” expressed concern about Little’s physical state. But Little responded, “Don’t worry, fellow worker, all we’re going to need now is guts.”[24] Well, Little had guts, no one ever questioned that.

The Anaconda Mining Company controlled Butte. It produced 10 percent of the world’s copper. It also hated unions. In the late 19th century, Butte had perhaps the nation’s strongest union culture. Some called it the “Gibraltar of Unionism.” But in 1903, Anaconda crushed the union and ran Butte with an iron hand from then on. After 1912, no one could work in the Butte mines without a rustling card, effectively a permit granted to individual workers by Anaconda. It used this card to drive out anyone suspected of union organizing.[25]

While Butte miners were strong AFL members during their heyday, the post-1903 situation was precisely the kind of thing the Industrial Workers of the World looked for: desperate yet proud workers who could be roused toward radical action. In June, a fire in the Speculator Mine killed 164 miners, the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history. Workers walked out in a spontaneous strike. They formed the Metal Mine Workers Union, demanded the end of the rustling card, collective bargaining rights, observance of state mining laws, free speech rights, discharge of the state mine inspector, and a wage increase. This soon expanded into new demands for safety instruction for miners and construction of manholes in the mines. By June 29, 15,000 men were off the job. Of course, the companies responded by blaming the IWW and indicted the workers for radicalism and pro-German sympathies during World War I.[26]

Little headed to Butte. It did not go well. Most of the miners did not have interest in radicalism, still holding onto their older union traditions. He tried. He connected the capitalist profiteering of World War I with the capitalist profiteering that cost the lives of so many men at the Speculator. For Little, the war mongers, the capitalists, and the private detective agencies such as the Pinkertons that spied on workers’ attempts to organize were all part of the same oppressive machine that needed revolution. This did not move many Butte workers. But that is organizing. Not everyone is ready to hear your message.[27]

Little’s arrival and especially his outspoken opposition to World War I threw Anaconda elites into a fury. Labor spies reported Little calling for revolution during union meetings. The companies decided to kill him. Little’s friends told him to leave town. But Little would not listen to them. Maybe he did not believe them. Maybe he did not care. Maybe he was just tired. In any case, he refused to leave Butte. On the night of August 1, 1917, six masked men came to his hotel room. They tied him up, took him to the edge of town, beat him, and hanged him from a railroad trestle. On his chest they pinned a note that read “3-7-77,” a code used by the vigilantes to take credit. A few days later, Montana declared martial law against war opponents, rounded up radicals of all stripes, and engaged in a massive state-sponsored violation of civil liberties. The people who murdered Little were never investigated, found, or prosecuted. They took their actions to the grave.[28]

Sometimes, organizers and radicals see a heroic future in martyrdom. That was the case of the anti-slavery radical John Brown when he faced execution for trying to start a war against slavery in 1859. It was also the case of the IWW miner and songwriter Joe Hill, executed in Utah in 1915 for a crime he didn’t commit. It was Hill who coined the great phrase about his own death, “Don’t Mourn, Organize.”[29]

I have no idea what Frank Little thought as his martyrdom took place. Probably terror and horror. But I also am sure he would agree with Hill. There’s nothing good about Little’s death. It’s one of so many terrible moments in American history. On the other hand, Little always kept his one good eye on the prize of worker liberation. No matter how bad things get today, we can gain inspiration from Little’s dignity, vision, and struggle. Whatever we face will likely pale in comparison to his suffering. We can at least maintain the optimism for the future that never left Little’s revolutionary mind.

Frank Little is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Butte, Montana.

If you would like this series to visit other IWW members, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ralph Chaplin, who wrote “Solidarity Forever,” is in Tacoma, Washington, and Vincent St. John is in Oakland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

[1] Jane Little Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW: The Blood That Stained an American Family (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 28-37; Michael J. Hightower, 1889: The Boomer Movement, the Land Run, and Early Oklahoma City (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018).

[2] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 50-77.

[3] David R. Berman, Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1880-1920: Socialists, Populists, Miners, and Wobblies (University Press of Colorado, 2007); Eric L. Clements, “Pragmatic Revolutionaries?: Tactics, Ideologies, and the Western Federation of Miners in the Progressive Era,” Western Historical Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 450-67.

[4] Andrew Arnold, Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disasters in Pennsylvania Coal Country (New York University Press, 2014); James Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015); David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (University of Illinois Press, 1960).

[5] J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (Simon & Schuster, 1997), 98-154; Ileen A. DeVault, United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism (Cornell University Press, 2004).

[6] Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860-1910 (University of California Press, 1979); Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (University of Illinois Press, 1998.

[7] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW,78-89

[8] Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World 2^nd ed. (University of Illinois Press, 1988), especially 81-87, 105-19.

[9] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 103-04.

[10] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 104.

[11] David Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 77-109; Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 106-21.

[12] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 122-30.

[13] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 131-92.

[14] Michael Cohen, “’The Ku Klux Government’: Vigilantism, Lynching, and the Repression of the IWW,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1, no 1 (Spring 2007): 31-56; Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 193-205; Stead, Always on Strike, 69-85.

[15] Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and the Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 137-74.

[16] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 222-43.

[17] Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origin of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

[18] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 353-60

[19] Cohen, “’The Ku Klux Government,’” 41.

[20] “Still on Strike! Recollections of a Bisbee Deportee—Fred Watson,” https://libcom.org/article/still-strike-recollections-bisbee-deportee-fred-watson.

[21] Erik Loomis, Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 18-88.

[22] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 247-56.

[23] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 256-68; Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2011); James W. Brykit, Forging the Copper Collar: Arizona’s Labor-Management War of 1901-1921 (University of Arizona Press, 2016).

[24] Quoted in Arnold Stead, Always on Strike: Frank Little and the Western Workers (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 2.

[25] Michael P. Malone, The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864-1906 (University of Washington Press, 1981).

[26] Arnon Gutfield, “The Speculator Disaster in 1917: Labor Resurgence in Butte, Montana,” Arizona and the West 11, no. 1 (April 1969): 27-38.

[27] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 279-90.

[28] Botkin, Frank Little and the IWW, 295-311

[29] William M. Adler, The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon (Bloomsbury, 2011); David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Labor Rights (Knopf Doubleday, 2005).