Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1890-1920

Socialists, Populists, Miners, and Wobblies

David R. Berman

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781607320067
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1890-1920 traces the history of radicalism in the Populist Party, Socialist Party, Western Federation of Miners, and Industrial Workers of the World in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.

Focusing on the populist and socialist movements, David R. Berman sheds light on American radicalism with this study of a region that epitomized its rise and fall. As the frontier industrialized, self-reliant pioneers and prospectors transformed into wage- laborers for major corporations with government, military, and church ties. Economically and politically stymied, westerners rallied around homegrown radicals such as William "Big Bill" Haywood and Vincent "the Saint" St. John and touring agitators such as Eugene Debs and Mary "Mother" Jones. Radicalism in the Mountain West tells how volleys of strikes, property damage, executions, and deportations ensued in the absence of negotiation.

Drawing on years of archival research and diverse materials such as radical newspapers, reports filed by labor spies and government agents, and records of votes, subscriptions, and memberships, Berman offers Western historians and political scientists an unprecedented view into the region's radical past.

CHAPTER ONE

Overview

THE MOUNTAIN WEST FROM 1890 TO 1920 was a place where, as historian John Caughey once noted, the environment had “to be taken into account.”¹ Writer Harvey Fergusson, son of a prominent New Mexico Progressive reformer with the same name, observed that the Mountain West towns of this period, when seen from a distance, looked “small and insignificant, completely dominated by a landscape that lends itself but grudgingly to human use.”² When coming to the region, Fergusson had the impression “of leaving a world of men and buildings and entering one dominated by mountains.”³

The area was vast, often bleak and desolate, with abundant natural resources but little water. One found rugged terrains and long distances between settlements. Socialist and labor organizers were commonly struck by how far they had to go just to find someone to talk to about joining up. Hundreds of agitators before and after Eugene Debs grumbled as they tried to get to remote mining camps and isolated farms, forced to depend on trains that frequently broke down or followed an unpredictable schedule. The region was sparsely settled. According to the 1890 national census, Nevada had only around 45,000 people, Wyoming had only a few more at 60,000, while Idaho had approximately 84,000. Colorado was the largest, with 412,000 residents. In most states and territories of the region, the foreign born constituted a relatively high percentage of the populations. Some of the foreign born, especially Western Europeans, were among the most active participants in Mountain West politics during the years in which the territories and states were still in the process of formation. Others, however, as noted later, did not fit in.

Politically, the region was a place of highly personal politics, of small settlements where everyone knew everyone and character often counted more than party when it came to getting elected to office. The area, though, was also subject to sudden and unsettling changes—boom-and-bust periods were common, with the latter leaving considerable economic distress. Often settlements came and went within a matter of months. At any given time the area was also a place of considerable cultural, social, and political contrasts—for example, farms with straitlaced and family-centered Mormon communities sometimes coexisted with “spiritually feeble” mining camps filled with unattached males. Within mining camps one commonly found dozens of languages spoken and a complex, sometimes explosive combination of ethnic and racial groups. Economically, the region existed largely to supply raw materials to the rest of the country. Its prosperity was highly dependent on eastern and foreign investors and the federal government. Along with this dependency came resentment.

If the people of the Mountain West shared anything in the 1880s, it was the desire for economic development, much of which rested on extracting the mineral resources found there. To develop the region, state and local officials requested help from the federal government to subdue Indians, improve mail service, and provide better transportation facilities. On their own, state and territorial legislatures chartered railroads and, unable to directly finance road construction, granted franchises to toll companies and allowed them to charge whatever rates the market would bear. Meanwhile, boosters conducted promotional campaigns through newspapers and books aimed at readers in the more settled parts of the country or in foreign countries, providing them with a continual flow of information—some of dubious accuracy—about the region’s economic potential. By the 1880s, the developmental and promotional efforts began to pay off—in came the railroads and in came the capital from the eastern United States and Europe necessary for large-scale deep mining operations.

The intrusion of large corporations—often eastern or foreign owned—into the affairs of Mountain westerners, however, produced a backlash. The economic and political dominance of these corporations, often referred to as “the beasts,” alarmed observers throughout the region. Wyoming became known as a satrap of the Union Pacific Railroad. Critics charged that political power in Nevada resided with wealthy San Franciscans who controlled the Southern Pacific Railroad. Reformers in Colorado saw the state as well on its way toward becoming a colonial economy controlled by absentee capitalists who had invested in deep shaft mines. In Montana, the dominant force became the Anaconda Mining Company, which was purchased by Standard Oil Company in 1899 and stayed under its control until 1915. Arizona reformers focused on the “big four”—two copper companies, the United Verde located in the north and the Copper Queen in the south, and two railroads, the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific—which had shown their ability to work together to block any legislation that adversely affected any of their interests. In Utah the powerful Mormon Church backed corporate interests by strongly supporting the capitalist system and condemning unions. In New Mexico power was said to rest in a political ring tied to an economic elite made up of railroad, mining, and livestock interests. Similar interests prevailed in Wyoming. Nearly everyone in the Mountain West had grievances against the railroads, while farmers had additional enemies in land and water monopolies and small ranchers, particularly in Wyoming and New Mexico, struggled against large ranchers. Office holders throughout the region were more than eager to do the bidding of the dominant economic interests. Many looked at the existing political arrangements with contempt.

Throughout the Mountain West, the concentration of economic power threatened the individualism of farmers, ranchers, miners, and other workers. They encountered big business, if not monopolistic conditions. The fact that the corporations were big was bad enough; the fact that many of them were also controlled by easterners made them even worse. As Richard D. Lamm and Michael McCarthy noted years later, people in the area “settled the land, lived on it, died on it. But they seldom owned it. . . . They blazed the trails, dammed the rivers, built the cities. But it was eastern power—mining combines, cattle cartels, railroads, banks, smelters, and political coalitions—that ruled.”⁴ The Mountain West, then, as it remained for decades to come, was a place with a chip on its shoulder.

By the late 1880s the once heavily courted corporations, particularly the large railroads and mining companies, became in the eyes of reformers throughout the Mountain West the outside, eastern “money interests” who were exploiting the wealth of the sparsely settled area, taking far more out of the local economy than they put in. Local politicians also charged the giant corporations with mistreating workers, farmers, and small businessmen and corrupting the political system. The railroads faced additional charges of receiving unfair tax advantages, hoarding the millions of acres of land given to them by the federal or state governments, being partial to particular shippers (through kickbacks and preferential shipping allotments), and charging excessively high rates for both passengers and freight. Anti-corporate reformers called for shifting a greater portion of the tax burden to large business concerns, regulating the rates and services of large enterprises, adopting measures to protect or advance the interests of the working class, and adding reforms such as the initiative, referendum, and recall that would ward off corporate control of the political system.

Anti-corporatism was not the whole of reform politics in the Mountain West. It was, however, an important element and one that linked the Populists, Socialists, and an emerging labor movement—the most reform-minded, if not radical, component of which existed in mining areas. Radicals, working from the anti-corporate perspective, argued that workers deserved better jobs and better government and that the solution was to give them greater control over both. Although Socialists had broader aims, they, like the Populists, had an important place in the anti-corporate political movement that ultimately produced a variety of economic and political reforms identified with the early-twentieth-century Progressives.

The impact of industrialization was first felt in the mining areas of the Mountain West. During the last few decades of the nineteenth century, prospectors and, later, large-scale development companies found several minerals—particularly silver, gold, lead, and copper—throughout the Mountain West. Small companies and even individuals could profitably mine and transport gold and silver. Mining, for many, was an individual activity that required little more than a pick, a shovel, and a pan to go into business. By the 1890s and even earlier in some places, however, placer mining began to give way to deep shaft mining. With the advent of deep mining, miners became the employees of large corporations, often owned by absentee capitalists. The character of mining changed from an occupation that offered “to all the world the chance to be one’s own master” and an “equal opportunity for wealth” to one whose “attractions were only those of an eastern factory town.”⁵

With the transition, the miner turned from a self-reliant prospector who stood a chance of striking it rich to an industrial worker or wage miner dependent on the absentee owners of a large corporation for his livelihood. Miners, both new and old to the profession, often found employment in isolated company towns where virtually everything, including the homes in which they lived, belonged to the mining companies. Miners in some camps received scrip redeemable only at overly expensive company stores as pay. Those who thought about striking knew they risked losing their company-owned homes and having their credit denied at company-owned stores. Absentee ownership made matters worse in that it ended the rather close relationship that had existed between employees and employers in locally owned mining companies. With absentee ownership, those who profited the most were far removed from conditions under which profits were made. Employees discovered that owners were more difficult, if not impossible, to reach, and owners found it easier to ignore workers’ demands. Local managers, critics charged, were incompetent, especially in personnel matters, and too eager to please owners with bottom-line results.⁶

Within mining communities, tensions grew because of the divisions between those who had become wealthy from mining activities and those still struggling. Company officials, leading merchants, and professional people separated themselves from the less successful. Society in the sense of class consciousness came early to the new industrial communities.⁷ Worker solidarity, however, was frustrated by friction among racial, ethnic, and religious groups—divisions owners were eager to exploit. In some mining camps, thirty or more nationalities were represented. Writing about divisions in the copper camp of Bingham Canyon, Utah, for example, one observer in a leftist publication noted that, with the help of mine owners stirring things up, “The Finns dislike the Greeks, the Greeks look askance at the Slavonians, the Slavonians are distrustful of the Americans and the Americans proudly flout the whole batch of ‘ignorant foreigners’ and stand on their American birthright and supremacy.”⁸

Each group had its own particular characteristics and problems. In several camps, the Finns were among the more radically inclined and among those more likely to favor direct action against their employers. Historians estimate that about a quarter of the Finnish immigrants were attracted to Socialism.⁹ Finns played a strong role in Socialist party and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) affairs in various parts of the region, especially Montana and Wyoming. Other immigrant groups, such as the Greeks, were less radically inclined but could be aroused into strike activity.¹⁰ On the bottom of the heap were the Chinese and Mexicans. The Chinese, first arriving in the 1850s to do railroad work and later turning to mining and other occupations, were unwelcome in many mining towns. In some places they were kept out of the towns altogether. Sometimes they were the targets of violence, the most notorious instance of which occurred in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the fall of 1885, when white workers turned on strikebreaking Chinese, killing twenty-eight and driving hundreds of others out of the area. Much of the hostility resulted from the fact that in competing for mining jobs, the Chinese undercut the wages of white miners. Indeed, one of the driving forces behind the first miner unions was to protect against such competition.

Mexican miners initially were better off than the Chinese. Their experience in the deep silver and gold mines of northern Mexico gave them a prominent place in the early days of deep shaft mining in the Mountain West. By the 1880s, though, they had been replaced in the elite ranks by Cornish miners, who brought newer and more efficient techniques, and Mexicans began a slide to the bottom ranks of mine labor.¹¹ Anglos showed their sense of racial superiority by refusing to work side by side with Mexican workers.¹² Many immigrant workers from Mexico, Greece, Italy, and other places who sought unskilled railroad, construction, and mining jobs were virtually forced to work through agents known as padrones to secure employment. These immigrant bosses extracted high fees and regular payments from workers who got jobs through them. To keep their businesses going, they also arranged with employers for frequent firings to occur. In time, many immigrant workers rebelled against this coercive labor system.¹³

In the early years of industrial mining, several factors reduced worker stress. For one, workers and their leaders were slow to accept the new industrialism as a permanent condition. Many of those who worked for mining companies also worked at mining their own claims in their free time, still hoping to “strike it rich” on their own. Others acted as though they were still in business for themselves by “high-grading,” that is, pilfering from their employers. Discontent in many mining areas was further staved off because individual miners were often able to find employment with mine owners they knew. Moreover, if they were unhappy with their wages, they could often find a new camp where, because of the scarcity of labor, employers were willing to pay more. Many miners were single males and thus were relatively free to follow the labor market wherever it took them. Many regularly moved around the region, taking advantage of seasonal differences (going south in the winter, north in the summer) and sometimes working in coalfields, sometimes in copper mines.

By the early 1900s, however, many miners had begun to accept wage earning as a permanent condition (although Socialists continued to protest this situation), and with this came growing class consciousness and a move toward unionism to make the best of this situation. Surplus labor caused by increased foreign immigration and by the introduction of labor-saving machinery further stimulated unionization. Organization became necessary, if for no other reason than to protect wages from those willing to work for less. Although a genus of “hobo miners” continued to move from place to place, the mining workforce by the early twentieth century had generally become less mobile and more composed of family people who wished to stay in their communities. Miners, however, had little, if any, control over pay, hours of work, or safety conditions. They had to constantly guard against employers’ efforts to find cheaper labor by hiring immigrants. They had to worry about pay cuts. Employers frequently took such action in response to downturns, as an attempt to increase returns to investors, or simply to reduce the level of compensation to that for which the least demanding were willing to work. Miners were caught up in dangerous and insecure employment situations. Employers sometimes refused to do anything about the conditions and were willing and able to use the state against workers who protested.

Industrial conditions and the reputations of mine owners and their status among workers varied greatly from time to time and place to place. In 1899, miners were helping put out a fire in W. A. Clark’s United Verde Mine in Jerome, Arizona, while Idaho miners were blowing up a mill owned by the Sullivan and Bunker Hill Company. The difference, according to a miner quoted by an undercover operative in Leadville, Colorado, had to do with the fact that Clark “is a gentleman and treats his men right, while the owners of the Sullivan and Bunker Hill are genuine s--s of b--s and won’t recognize the fact that a workingman has any rights.”¹⁴ To quickly even up the record, in another camp a few years later, one miner volunteered within hearing distance of an operative that Clark “was a cheap old cuss and would never do anything for a laboring man.”¹⁵

Miners commonly complained about their pay and hours, how much it cost to rent company-owned housing, the high prices charged by company-owned stores, the prices and services of company doctors and hospitals, and nonexistent or inadequate safety measures. How bad conditions in mining areas actually were is a matter of some dispute among historians, but obviously they were often bad enough for many workers and those sympathetic to the workers to want to do something about them. Much of the time discontent stemmed from feelings of relative rather than absolute depravation—those aroused by differences in income between mine owners or managers and mine workers, between skilled and unskilled workers, or between workers from different ethnic groups, such as Mexicans and Anglos. Miners frequently complained that they were not getting their fair share of the profits.

Most of the early industrial conflicts in mining areas starting in the 1890s grew out of the owners’ refusal to bargain with unions or anyone other than individual workers. Mine owners banded together through associations and used several techniques and strategies to combat union activity. These included hiring strikebreakers (“scabs”), often Mexican or Chinese who would work for reduced wages; mine guards who would make sure the scabs could get to work without being hindered by union men; and labor spies supplied by such outfits as the Pinkerton Service to infiltrate the unions. The owners also secured court injunctions against union activities, closed down operations until workers got hungry and gave up their demands for union organization, circulated blacklists of those suspected of being union troublemakers to keep such people from finding employment, and made workers sign “yellow dog” contracts in which they agreed not to join a union once hired. When the chips were down, the corporations could often depend on the local sheriff or the state militia or federal troops to settle their disputes with workers. Governors regularly ...