There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal: Thursday September 7, 1916
International Socialist Review: George P. West on Minnesota Strike
THE MESABA STRIKE
By GEORGE P. WEST
The following are extracts from a report on the strike of iron miners now in progress on the Mesaba range in northern Minnesota which has been submitted to the Committee on Industrial Relations by George P. West, author of the report of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations on the Colorado strike. It is based on a field investigation.
The City of Duluth, the County of St. Louis, and the State of Minnesota, as represented by Governor Burnquist and other public officials, have joined hands in a relentless effort to crush out the strike of 15,000 iron miners now in progress on the Mesaba range, 70 miles north of Duluth.
With the support and good will of the United States Steel Corporation and affiliated interests as the stake, Governor Burnquist, Sheriff John R. Meining of Duluth, County Prosecutor Green and the Duluth Chief of Police are playing at ducks and drakes with the most sacred rights of the foreign workmen who mine the ore that goes down to the ships at Duluth for shipment to the Pittsburgh mills.
More than one thousand men, according to the sheriff’s own statement, have been deputized and armed with carbines, revolvers, and riot sticks. Clothed by the sheriff with the state authority, they have been placed in brutal and tyrannical control of a district comprising at least 100 square miles and 75,000 population. The slums of Duluth and other cities have been combed to recruit this army of gun men, and Sheriff John R. Meining, like Jeff Farr of Colorado, admitted to the writer that he had deputized the company guards without investigation of their records or character. In fact, he specifically stated that some of the men employed by the companies in this capacity, and deputized by him, “might possibly be” men of the character suggested when the writer told Sheriff Meining that they looked like thugs.
The part played by Governor Burnquist, County Prosecutor Greene and Chief of Police McKercher of Duluth will appear later.
Business Duluth is doing its bit. Responding to the Steel Corporation’s bidding, its leading wholesalers have served formal notice on the merchants of the iron range towns that all credit will be curtailed pending the strike and weekly payments required. A copy of this notice is in my possession.
And while the miners of Minnesota and their families face want and suffering and endure the abuse and violence of a private army of gunmen, the United States Steel Corporation announces the largest earnings in the history of an American industrial corporation.
LIKE COLORADO.
It is a story of public authority prostituted to private interests that is hardly equalled by Colorado, the same story of an industrial absolutism riveted on the workers through the ownership of control by a great corporation of the natural resources on which the economic life of the community depends.
One bright chapter can be written into strike records of Minnesota officials. The principal towns on the iron range,—a narrow strip of the richest iron ore on the continent, running east and west on the high tree-covered plateau above Lake Superior,—are Hibbing, with 15,000 population; Virginia, with 15,000, and Chisholm with 9,000. And their mayors, with a majority of their councilmen, stand squarely for the rights of the miners. Mayor Victor Power of Hibbing, Mayor Michael Boylan of Virginia, Mayor E. E. Weber of Chisholm, and officials of several lesser municipalities have done all within their power as officials or as men to protest against the outrageous lawlessness and cruelty of the companies and of their servants in public office.
Today, at the urging of the same municipal authorities, Mediators Davies and Fairley of the United States Department of Labor are on the range in an effort to break down the refusal of the companies to meet their men or even to consider their grievances. And the mayors of the range municipalities announce that if the Steel Corporation persists in its refusal to admit the possibility of grievances and in its blood and iron policy of crushing the strike with gun men, they will put the strikers to work on needed improvements for the cities where they live.
* * * *
Yet in what should have been the happiest, most prosperous communities in the world, the Steel Corporation has precipitated one of the most bitter, as it was one of the most spontaneous and unorganized, industrial revolts of recent history. It has done this by its policy of treating the men like serfs, denying them any voice, herding them with the aid of a permanent force of private police, and driving them at top speed by a vicious piece rate system of payment that leaves the door wide open for favoritism, injustice, and the extortion of bribes by the petty bosses who assign favorable or unfavorable working places.
The strike started without organization of any sort, and spread almost instantaneously through the iron range before any outside labor organization had participated. The men were unorganized and out of touch with the labor movement. An appeal reached the I. W. W. and organizers for that organization made a prompt response. It is not an I. W. W. strike in the sense that it was started by agents of that organization. No I. W. W. agent or organizer was on the range prior to the beginning of the strike. I. W. W. agents have offered to withdraw from the district if their elimination would lead to settlement, and the strikers have specifically agreed in writing in a communication to the companies that they would not ask for the recognition of any union. Yet the companies refused a conference.
Thousands of the best miners have left the iron range never to return. The vast majority of those remaining are resisting all urgings to return to work, and if funds can be procured there is a likelihood that grievances will be adjusted.
* * *
Laborers in the open-pit surface workings are now paid $2.60 for a ten-hour day. In the underground workings, where the majority of miners are employed, the miners work an eight-hour day and are paid on piece rate basis, designed to speed the men up. Rates per car of ore mined are changed every week, resulting in driving the men at top speed and placing them in competition with each other.
Miner after miner swears that pit bosses and foreman exact bribes for awarding favorable “ground” to the men, and that no miner can obtain a working place where $3 or more can be earned unless he has first won the good will of the shift boss or foreman, by whatever means appeals to that individual. Inasmuch as petty common bribery is in plants where this system prevails, and employers often admit the necessity of fighting it, these complaints undoubtedly are based on widespread abuses.
* * *
There remains to be told the steps by which public authority in Minnesota prostituted itself to the Steel Corporation and the economic interests of the privileged class, and in doing so violated not only common justice and humanity, but every constitutional right of the miners in the premises.
Sheriff Meining’s deputization of more than 1,000 gun men has already been told. To his credit, he informed the writer that “if I had it to do over again I would do differently,” and agreed that the state’s police power should not be put into the hands of guards employed by the companies, and of whom no investigation had previously been made.
Sheriff Meining acted largely at the direction of Governor Burnquist, at St. Paul, but not beyond the influences that dominate in Duluth. Burnquist sent a personal representative to investigate. The governor’s agent, Gustavus Lindquist, spent a week on the iron range in the company of corporation officials. He did not go near the striking miners or the municipal authorities. So flagrant was his disregard of the miners’ claims and interests that the authorities of the range cities met and adopted a resolution denouncing his course, which they forwarded to the governor. Acting on this man’s report and in conformity with the wishes of the Steel Corporation, Governor Burnquist on June 30 sent the following telegram to Sheriff Meining:
Arrest forthwith and take before magistrate, preferably at Duluth, all persons who have participated and are participating in riots in your county and make complaints against them. Prevent further breaches of the peace, riots and unlawful assemblies. Use all your powers for the preservation of life and property.
It should be noted that the range towns are seventy miles from Duluth and that magistrates were available at all of them. Surely there is something in the Minnesota laws directing that men charged with crime be taken before the nearest magistrate. But Duluth, ambitious and hungry for eastern capital, is notoriously with the companies and against any interest opposing them.
In the light of that one phrase, “Preferably at Duluth” and of subsequent developments, the observer can almost see the hand reaching over Burnquist’s shoulder and directing his pen. Commenting on the telegram, the Mesaba Ore, a newspaper of general circulation at Hibbing, said on July 22:
The governor accepted without question the word of the mining companies that the law was being violated on the ranges by the striking miners, that riot and bloodshed was rampant and life and property were in danger of destruction from the mob, but the governor made no effort, it appears, to ascertain the truth or falsity of the statement made to him by the mining companies—he acted blindly.
Had the governor made proper, or half proper, investigation he would have learned that nearly all of the law violation that followed the strike was that of the armed thugs employed by the mining companies, or inspired by them.
In his order to the sheriff to unarm the strikers the governor was commanding a county official to violate his oath of office. By that order the sheriff was expected to approach a group of men anywhere and proceed to go through their pockets without formality—simply strong-arm them; he was ordered to enter without warrant the homes of the miners and search for fire arms, and if there was resistance to arrest the miners and slap them into jail, or beat them into insensibility with a billie. Deputy sheriffs employed by the mining company used these tactics as an excuse for “getting” the men they wanted, and they were exceedingly busy along that line.
Was there ever anything more likely to drench the range with human blood than this governor’s order to the sheriff? It was just what the mining companies wanted to give their gun men, their armed thugs, full authority to murder those opposed to the mining company—the authority of the State of Minnesota backing up the mining companies in the wanton killing of men who were only asking for an increase in wages, and the protection of the state for their thugs with the bloody hands.
THE GOVERNOR’S PART.
Following the receipt of this telegram, the company gun men became bolder. On July 3 a notorious character named Nick Dillon, a gun man in the employ of one of the companies, stormed into the home of a striker at Biwabik without knocking, armed with a revolver, and followed by three deputy sheriffs. According to a newspaper owned by the postmaster of Duluth, Dillon received his training as “bouncer” for a house of ill-fame. This invasion of a workingman’s home, the facts of which are admitted, was undertaken ostensibly to serve a warrant for the illegal sale of liquor. Surrounded by his wife, children and several miners who boarded with him, the miner hotly resented the intrusion of the company guard, and a fight ensued in which one deputy sheriff and a peddler friendly to the miners was killed, and a miner shot twice through the thigh. The miner and four of his friends were arrested, taken to Duluth, and jailed for first degree murder. A coroner’s jury refused to return a verdict fixing responsibility.
Within a few hours of this outrage on the part of the company guard and the subsequent tragedy, seven organizers for the I. W. W., stationed at distant points on the range, were arrested without warrants, refused a hearing, placed on a special train, taken to Duluth seventy miles distant, and lodged in the county jail charged with murder in the first degree.
Under a peculiar Minnesota statute these organizers are charged as principals in the murder of the deputy sheriff on the ground that speeches made by them induced the killing. The writer talked to a witness for the state who had heard the organizers advise the strikers to refrain from violence, and keep their hands in their pockets, but to retaliate if the life of one of the strikers was taken by a guard. This and the fact that the miners carried union cards apparently is the principal, and in fact, the only evidence against the organizers. Yet Sheriff Meining admitted to the writer that if gun men in the employ of a private corporation were to enter his home without knocking and threaten the safety and lives of himself and family he would feel justified in defending himself.
These arrests are only the worst of many violent acts committed by sheriff’s deputies and company gun men. Strikers have been arrested by the hundred and thrown into jail on trumped up charges. Picketing was absolutely surpressed, and Finnish Socialists were thrown out of their own halls and refused the right of lawful assembly. A steel corporation gunman named King, employed by the Duluth, Misabe & Northern Railroad, a steel trust subsidiary, became so offensive and shameless in his efforts to start trouble at Hibbing that he was ordered out of the district by Sheriff Meining himself.
The story is not yet half told of the lengths to which the companies went in beating up, shooting, jailing and terrorizing their workmen, of how they cloaked their acts by appealing to popular prejudice against the I. W. W. and ascribing the strike to I. W. W. organizers, who had nothing to do with its inception; of how the Duluth newspapers, subservient to the company interest, exhorted the authorities to disregard every legal constitutional right of these organizers, and how the authorities responded. It is a story of tyrannical abuse, cruelty and persecution involving a hundred cases and a thousand details. And all to defeat any movement looking toward industrial democracy, living wages, a square deal for the men who mine the raw material for the country’s prosperous and powerful corporation.
The strikers have done and are doing their part in this battle for freedom, for the things America is supposed to stand for.
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SOURCE
The International Socialist Review, Volume 17
-ed by Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
Charles H. Kerr & Company,
July 1916-June 1917
https://books.google.com/books?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ
ISR, Sept 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA133
The Mesaba Strike by George P West
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA158
IMAGE
Masonovich-P.&M. & Boarders, ISR, Sept 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA161
See also:
Report on the Colorado Strike
-by George P West, 1915
https://archive.org/stream/reportoncolorado00unit#page/n5/mode/2up
American Socialist
(Chicago, Illinois)
September 2, 1916, page 1
“Minnesota Governor I Shown Tool of Steel Trust
-by George P. West
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/american-socialist/v3n08-sep-02-1916-TAS.pdf
The Labor World
(Duluth, Minnesota)
September 2, 1916, page 1
“Steel Corporation Held Responsible”
-by George P. West
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn78000395/1916-09-02/ed-1/seq-1/
The New Republic
(New York, New York)
-Sept 2, 1916
“The Mesaba Range Strike”
-by George P. West
https://www.unz.org/Pub/NewRepublic-1916sep02-00108
Vigilante Man – Ry Cooder
Lyrics by Woody Guthrie
http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Vigilante_Man.htm