Always on Strike

134 Pages·2015·0.9 MB·English

by  Arnold Stead [Stead

Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: The Western Wobblies
Chapter Two: Free-Speech Fights
Chapter Three: Iron Miners, Harvest Hands, and Oil Workers
Chapter Four: Urgency and Conspiracy
Chapter Five: Big Bill Haywood and Frank Little
Chapter Six: Three Western Wobbly Martyrs
Conclusion: Frank Little, Where Are You Now that We Need You?
Acknowledgments
Sources
Notes
About the Author

Haymarket Books
Chicago, Illinois

To the memory of my brother, Christopher Anthony Stead, a workingman
and artist

© 2014 Arnold Stead

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This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and
the Wallace Action Fund.

Cover design by Julie Fain. Cover image from a painting by Keith Seidel.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter One: The Western Wobblies 15
Chapter Two: The Free-Speech Fights 41
Chapter Three: Iron Miners, Harvest Hands,
and Oil Workers 69
Chapter Four: Urgency and Conspiracy 111
Chapter Five: Big Bill Haywood and Frank Little 143
Chapter Six: Three Western Wobbly Martyrs 155
Conclusion: Frank Little, Where Are You
Now that We Need You? 163
Acknowledgments 167
Sources 169
Notes 175
Index 183
Introduction
Many years after the fact, during a far more conservative period of his life,
Ralph Chaplin writes that Frank Little was the first to arrive for a meeting of the
General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World in late July of
1917. Although we may have reason to doubt his memory (it has Little leaving
Chicago en route to Butte a full week after that city’s press announced the hobo
agitator’s arrival in Montana), Chaplin’s vivid description of his last encounter
with Little has a ring of truth to it. He writes: “Frank wore his Stetson at the
same jaunty angle, and his twisted grin was as aggressive as ever.” The
meeting’s primary purpose was to decide whether or not Wobblies should
register for the draft. Board member Richard Brazier, like Chaplin and
Haywood, thought opposing conscription would put the International Workers of
the World, known as the IWW or the Wobblies, “out of business.” Little shot
back at him: “They’ll run us out of business anyhow. Better to go out in a blaze
of glory than to give in. Either we’re for this capitalist slaughter fest or we’re
against it. I’d rather take a firing squad.”
In response, “Bill [Haywood] looked angry, the others bewildered,” and
Chaplin hastily wrote a “compromise statement.” The board would not sign it,
but instead told Chaplin to send it under his signature. He remembers taking the
statement with him when he registered for the draft. The following day, July 25,
Chaplin writes that Little “hobbled up to my offices to say goodbye.” The latter
said, “You’re wrong about registering for the draft. It would be better to go
down slugging.” Chaplin “marveled” at Little’s “courage in taking on a difficult
and dangerous assignment like [the Butte strike] in his present condition.”
Chaplin continues:
“‘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. ‘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.”
Historian Arnon Gutfeld describes the assassination of Frank Little: At about
three a.m. the morning of August 1, “a large black car stopped in front of 316
North Wyoming Street.” Six masked men emerged from the vehicle and entered
a boarding house next to Finnlander Hall where Frank Little was staying. The
men frightened the landlady, Mrs. Nora Byrne, by kicking in the door of a room
they mistakenly thought Little to be occupying. She asked them what they
wanted and they replied, “We are officers and we want Frank Little.” His
abductors did not allow the hobo agitator to dress, and when he resisted they
carried him to the black automobile.
“The car sped away, but stopped after traveling a short distance and Little, still in his underwear, was
tied to the car bumper. He must have been dragged a considerable distance, for his kneecaps were
later found to have been scrapped off. He was taken to the Milwaukee Bridge, a short distance
outside the city limits. There he was severely beaten, as bruises on his skull indicated, and hanged
from a railroad trestle. Pinned to his underwear was a six-by-ten inch placard with the inscription,
‘Others take notice, first and last warning, 3–7-77.’ On the bottom of the note, the letters ‘L-D-C-S-
S-W-T’ were printed, and the letter ‘L’ encircled.”
The numbers 3–7-77 aroused a good many theories, including one by a Butte
citizen who believed it was Little’s draft number and that he committed suicide
to avoid being inducted into the military. It is now generally believed, however,
that the figures designate Montana specifications for a grave: three feet wide,
seven feet deep, and seventy-seven inches long. The Butte press seemed to think
D-C-S-S-W-T stood for the last names of men the “vigilantes” were going to
“visit” next: William Dunne, Tom Campbell, Joe Shannon, Dan Shovlin, John
Williams, and Leon Tomich; “all of whom were leaders of the Metal Mine
Workers Union.”
◊ ◊ ◊
I first discovered Frank Little quite by accident. With no students to occupy me
during office hours, I began to browse through the Encyclopedia of the American
Left and found in an entry on the great novelist Dashiell Hammett that some
people believed he had been involved in the lynching of Frank Little. Long a
Hammett fan, I had never heard of Frank Little. Under the former’s name I
found a fragment of a thought-provoking figure, and I have been collecting
Frank Little fragments ever since. If not for my interest in Dashiell Hammett,
creator of characters such as Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, I might
well have never discovered Frank Little, a legendary figure in his own right.
Hammett would have been about twenty-one years old when Little was
murdered and highly unlikely to have had any notions of one day being a
respected writer of hard-boiled detective fiction.
Young Hammett was working as a Pinkerton operative in Butte, Montana, the
summer Frank Little was murdered.1 He was in town to help break the miners’
strike that Little was probably leading, clandestinely of course. In those days, the
agency that Alan Pinkerton had founded at the behest of the nation’s biggest
bosses, particularly the railroad magnates, did its bread-and-butter business as a
strike-breaking force. The Industrial Workers of the World was involved in a
strike against the Butte branch of the Anaconda Copper Company so the
company hired Pinkertons. According to William F. Nolan, one of Hammett’s
biographers, “Hammett discovered that one man in particular was causing major
trouble for the mining company. His name was Frank Little, a labor union
organizer known as the ‘hobo agitator.’ Little, who had lost one eye, was part
Indian and possessed a warrior’s tenacity and courage; he would not be bluffed
or scared off. Union members supported him enthusiastically as he raved and
shouted against injustices in the mines.” Might we assume the man who could
not be “bluffed or scared off” had to be killed?
In the early 1930s, Hammett told Lillian Hellman that an officer of Anaconda
Copper had offered him five thousand dollars to kill Frank Little. He also said:
“I had no political conscience in ’17. I was just doing a job, and if our clients
were rotten it didn’t concern me. They hired us to break up a union strike, so we
went out there [Butte] to do that.” Hammett said he turned down the offer, but
Hellman seems convinced the incident played a pivotal role in his life. In
Scoundrel Time she tells her readers: “Through the years he was to repeat that
bribe offer so many times, that I came to believe, knowing him now, that it was a
kind of key to his life. He had given a man the right to think he would murder . .
. I think I can date Hammett’s belief that he was living in a corrupt society from
Little’s murder.”
Hammett did not meet Hellman until approximately fifteen years after Little
was lynched, yet Hammett could not put what happened in Butte behind him.
Moreover, he spoke of the offer several times over the course of the couple’s
relationship. One cannot help but wonder if Hammett, in fact, did not refuse the
offer. Or, perhaps he blamed himself for not doing something to prevent the
assassination he knew was in the making.
Another of Hammett’s biographers, Diane Johnson, writes that the author of
The Maltese Falcon was raised by a hard-luck father with big ideas and little
else. As a young man he was essentially conservative but had a penchant for