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| The 1913 funeral procession in South Range, Michigan. More than 73 people died, including more than 60 children. |
A few days ago, the 100th anniversary of a tremendous strike and one of the labor movement’s greatest American tragedies — and some still say mass-murders — was marked in northern Michigan’s Copper Country. Beginning July 23, a series of labor demonstrations were met with harsh counter tactics. The mostly immigrant miners found themselves at odds with the mine bosses and local officials at a time when the labor movement was in its nascence. A long hot summer and contentious fall came to a bloody apex by Christmas.
This remarkable story by Aaron Goings and Gary Kaunenon in Labor World tells the tale. Read it, please, but here’s the heart-breaker. This rare English-language editorial was printed on the front page of the Finnish language newspaper Työmies, a leading voice in the strike:
“The most appalling disaster in the history of Michigan occurred last evening at the Italian Hall in Calumet where hundreds of men, women and children had gathered to witness Christmas exercises for the strikers[’] children. The program which was quite lengthy had just begun when a strange man ascended the stairway, yelled “fire” and quickly made his escape to the street. Several persons who stood near the entrance where this man appeared, state that he had his cap pulled down over his eyes, and that pinned to the lapel of his coat was a Citizen’s [sic] Alliance button. At the cry of fire the great crowd arose as one and made a mad rush for the exit in the front of the building. In the rush down the stairway many fell and being unable to regain their feet were trampled to death, their bodies acting as stumbling blocks for others who followed, until the hallway was entirely blocked by the dead and dying. The fire alarm was soon sounded and those responding were forced to gain entrance to the hall by ladders at the front windows. Firemen entered the building in this manner and stopped the panic stricken crowd from further crowding into the hallway upon the dead bodies of their friends in a frantic effort to escape. The bodies in the hallway were so tightly packed that they could not be released from below, and firemen were compelled to remove the dead from the top of the stairway carrying the dead and dying back up into the hall before the stairs could be cleared. At the time the cry of fire was sounded in the hall Mrs. Annie Clemenc was making a talk to the little ones present who naturally were crowded as near the stage as possible, their little faces beaming with happiness, their hearts bounding with Christmas cheer. In less than three minutes afterward fifty of their frail little bodies were jammed and crushed in the hallway being used as a roadway over which their companions were vainly endeavoring to escape. The scene was a horrible one, and will never be effaced from the minds of those who witnessed the terrible tragedy.
The bodies of the dead were taken to a temporary morgue established in the town hall as soon as they were removed from the building. As soon as identifications were made, the bodies were removed to their homes. In some homes the mother and all the children lie cold in death, the husband and father crazed with grief. In others the mother being the only one spared has been plunged into despair and sorrow that yet dazes her, the full truth not yet dawning upon her terrified brain.”
Goings and Kaunenon conclude the story with how the story made its way into the American populist folk canon:
Written three decades after the tragedy, Woody Guthrie’s song “1913 Massacre” gave voice to the many Copper County workers who, as the Työmies article suggested, believed the Italian Hall “tragedy” was really more of a “massacre”:
Take a trip with me in nineteen thirteen
To Calumet, Michigan, in the copper country
I’ll take you to a place called Italian Hall
And the miners are having their big Christmas ball . . .Such a terrible sight I never did see
We carried our children back up to their tree
The scabs outside still laughed at their spree
And the children that died there was seventy-threeThe piano played a slow funeral tune,
And the town was lit up by a cold Christmas moon
The parents, they cried and the men, they moaned,
See what your greed for money has done?
Like the strikes on Minnesota’s Iron Range at this same time, it would take decades for the workers’ demands to be recognized in full, ultimately because the ores were too important to the war effort.
I have great-grandparents, who I met in life, who would have been children at about this time in history. A century is not so long.
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