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Hellraisers Journal – Friday October 10, 1913
Calumet, Michigan – Annie Clemenc, Leader of Women and Strike Sympathizers
From The Day Book of October 8, 1913:
The news dispatches tell of the arrest of Annie Clemenc, leader of the women strike sympathizers at Calumet, Michigan-the woman who has carried the American flag at the head of the striking miners daily parade.
But that doesn’t tell very much. It doesn’t tell the story of Annie Clemenc. The name means nothing to you who read the mere statement that Annie Clemenc was arrested.
But I have met Annie Clemenc. I have talked with her. I have seen her marching along the middle of the street, carrying that great American flag. It is a silk flag. The staff must be fully two inches thick.
When I read that Annie Clemenc has been arrested I think of the dirty little jail in Calumet. And I think of Joan of Arc and the Goddess of Liberty. Then I think of the notable women I have seen in New York, in San Francisco, in Chicago and in Washington.
Early one morning I trudged along the road, walking at one side with Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners, as the parade went from Red Jacket to Laurium and back. Women were in the front-miners’ wives, miners’ daughters-and Annie Clemenc, heroine, marched with them and carried the flag.
Annie Clemenc is a miner’s wife. A Croatian [Slovenian], she was born in this county and educated in the schools of Calumet. If she were dressed in the fashion people would turn to look at her if she walked down State street or Fifth avenue. Even in her plain dress she is a striking figure. Strong, with firm but supple muscles, fearless, ready to die for a cause, this woman is the kind all red-blooded men could take their hats off to.
A militia officer said to me at Calumet: “If McNaughton could only buy Big Annie he could break this strike.”
I suppose Annie Clemenc knows what it is to go hungry, but I don’t believe all the millions of dividends ever taken out of the Calumet & Hecla mine could buy her.
The day when the soldiers rode down the flag Annie Clemenc stood holding the staff of that big flag in front of her, horizontally. She faced cavalrymen with drawn sabers, infantrymen with bayonetted guns. They ordered her back. She didn’t move an inch. She defied the soldiers. She was struck on her right wrist with a bayonet, and over the right bosom and shoulder with a deputy’s club.
[She said:]
Kill me. Run your bayonets and sabers through this flag and kill me, but I wont go back. If this flag will not protect me, then I will die with it.
And she didn’t go back. Miners rushed up, took the flag and got her back for fear she might be killed.
After the parade one morning Annie Clemenc came up to the curb where President Moyer was standing. I was there.
Looking up at him she said:
It’s hard to keep one’s hands off the scabs.
I asked her if the big flag wasn’t heavy.
[She said:]
I get used to it. I carried it ten miles one morning. The men wouldn’t let me carry it back. I love to carry it.
One Sunday afternoon I followed the parade on the long walk from Red Jacket to the Palestra Rink at Laurium. Annie Clemenc was dressed in a plain white gown. There were no fancy frills on it-just a touch of colored ribbon. She wore no hat, and her dark hair waved with the breeze. From the top of the big flag staff she carried a streamer ran to either side, the ends held by neatly-dressed little girls who proudly marched at Annie’s side.
I imagine the white dresses of the little girls were made by their mothers. The faces of the little girls were beautiful. Their features were clean-cut. There were pretty ribbons in their hair. But the spirit! You don’t see it in the cities.
I walked fully two miles admiring those beautiful children, daughters of striking miners in the copper country; and I felt like keeping my hat off in reverence to all those women and children. I found use for my handkerchief. Something got the matter with my eyes as I thought how glorious humanity is at what we in our blindness think is its worst.
I was told up at Calumet that some of the miners have twelve children and that large families are common. I knew that families run small in the mansions of our cities.
I marveled at the wisdom of Nature’s laws. I had a new light on the law of the survival of the fittest. I thought what glorious men and women America would produce if there were millions of mothers like Annie Clemenc. I thought how much the future of the race would owe to the fact that the families of the rich die out while the workers multiply and replenish the earth.
I thought of James McNaughton, general manager of the Calumet & Hecla Company, and his salary of $40,000 a year as general manager, $25,000 a year as second vice-president and $20,000 a year as director, to say nothing of the additional salary he gets as manager of other companies controlled by the Calumet & Hecla.
And I thought that one Annie Clemenc, miner’s wife, was worth thousands of James McNaughtons to the human race and its civilization.
I thought of a question I heard Gov. Ferris of Michigan ask Clarence Darrow a few days before in the governor’s office at Lansing.
“How many of these miners are foreigners who expect to go back home when they have got enough money saved? “
I knew that but a short time before James McNaughton had spent four hours in private conference with Gov. Ferris at his home in Big Rapids. So I could imagine how McNaughton talked about the miners to the governor of Michigan, a good soul who has been a school teacher all his life, yet can’t find a way to help the miners and their families in their war with capital up in the northern peninsula.
Annie Clemenc is more of an American in my esteem than the spineless but well-meaning governor of Michigan. And as manhood goes, she’s more of a man in fighting quality, in sand, in courage, in heroism than Gov. Ferris.
I believe Annie Clemenc would make a better governor of Michigan than Ferris will-that is, better for humanity. If she couldn’t find laws in the books to help humanity, she would do it with her bare hands, law or no law.
I have no patience with governors, judges or presidents who won’t move for humanity until they find a law that tells them what they can legally do. Annie Clemenc isn’t afraid to die. Nor is she afraid to laugh at rotten laws that were made by kept tools of plutocracy to make property more precious than human life and liberty.
If Annie Clemenc is in that dirty little jail now, the American flag would be better off on top of that jail than over some court house. Where she is, there is the love of liberty and the courage to fight for it.
And I shall not be surprised any day to read that Annie Clemenc has been murdered by the hired murderers imported by the mine managers from the slums of New York to help enslave the miners of the copper country.
If she is, it will be because she can find no protection under the American flag she carries.
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Annie Clemenc, Die Behind Flag
–Miners Bulletin, Sept 16, 1913
per Comstock p42
https://books.google.com/books?id=0-FGAgAAQBAJ
The Day Book
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Oct 8, 1913
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1913-10-08/ed-1/seq-1/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1913-10-08/ed-1/seq-2/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1913-10-08/ed-1/seq-3/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1913-10-08/ed-1/seq-4/
See also:
Anna Klobuchar Clemenc
https://www.nps.gov/kewe/anna-klobuchar-clemenc.htm#:~:text=Born%20in%20Calumet%2C%20Michigan%20to,of%20the%20Women’s%20Auxiliary%20No.
Negley D. Cochran Collection Biographical Sketch
https://docplayer.net/9365842-Negley-d-cochran-collection-biographical-sketch.html
The Day Book, 1911-1917
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Book
The Day Book (Chicago, Ill.) 1911-1917
https://www.loc.gov/item/sn83045487/
Tag: N. D. Cochran
https://weneverforget.org/tag/n-d-cochran/
Tag: The Day Book
https://weneverforget.org/tag/the-day-book/
Tag: Annie Clemenc
https://weneverforget.org/tag/annie-clemenc/
Tag: Michigan Copper Country Strike of 1913-1914
https://weneverforget.org/tag/michigan-copper-country-strike-of-1913-1914/
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While researching copper mining in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, fourth graders discovered a 6 foot 2 Hero nick-named Big Annie. These ballads were written in honor of her deeds and memory.