Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday June 9, 1920
Butte, Montana – W. F. Dunne on the Anaconda Road Massacre
From The Liberator of June 1920:
Why Copper Is Red
By W. F. Dunne
ANOTHER crimson chapter has been added to the bloody history of Butte, Montana. It was written on April 21 when Winchester repeaters in the hands of gunmen of the Anaconda Mining Co;, poured their deadly loads of buskshot into a peaceful assemblage of striking miners.
Thomas Manning is dead, two more lie at the point of death, twelve more were wounded. Everyone of the victims was shot in the back.
The Butte Daily Bulletin of April 26, 1920
The miners struck on Monday, April 19. Their demands were as follows:
Release of all industrial and political prisoners. Six-hour day from collar to collar. Minimum wage scale of $7 a day for all workers in the mining industry. Abolition of the rustling-card. Abolition of contract and bonus and so-called efficiency system. Two men work together on all machines, and two men to work together in all workings.
The picket lines were sent out and by Tuesday evening, as they say in Butte, “the hill was clean.” The hoisting of ore ceased. The strike was called on Sunday, April 18, by Local 800 Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, at two meetings attended by over 2,500 miners. For several weeks miners had been leaving Butte by the dozens, dissatisfied with the contract and bonus system instituted by the mining companies. Men were forced to take contracts and if they made more than a day’s pay received but a fraction of their increased earnings in their envelopes; if they failed to break enough rock, at the price per cubic foot paid, to equal a day’s pay, they were fired. At the Sunday meetings some speakers urged postponement of action until June but were greeted with silence. The miners wanted to strike and strike at once. The demands were drawn up, the strike declared and a committee appointed to close all of the boot-legging joints to eliminate trouble as far as possible. Between forty and sixty illegal places were closed on Monday evening by the miners committee but they were immediately told to open up the following morning by the authorities, and did so.
The picketing was peaceful, the only violence coming from the company gunmen who adopted the practice of driving up in machines, leaping out, blackjacking pickets and driving off before any resistance could be offered. Outside of these incidents-not unusual even when there is no industrial trouble-the city was quiet-too quiet. That indefinable something that precedes tragedy-the intangible feeling that the workers of Butte have come to know so well was in the air. “The company is framing to pull off something,” was a phrase frequently heard on the streets.
Anaconda Road leads from Wyoming street “up the hill” past the Never Sweat and Anaconda mines. It is a county thoroughfare. About five o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, a crowd of pickets were assembled on the road below the Never Sweat mine. A curious throng had also gathered because it had become known that the sheriff’s force and the city policemen had been “ordered on the hill.”
Sheriff O’Rourke interviewed the captain of the pickets and told them they must keep off of the company property. They asked him if they were not on a county road, and he admitted that they were. They told him to arrest them if they were violating the law. He said that he was there to protect everybody and when some of the striking miners pointed out gunmen standing nearby who had slugged them he said he would investigate. .
Roy Alley, (the private secretary of John· D. Ryan who is head of the Anaconda Mining Co.,) commander-in-chief of the gunmen, had driven up with several machine loads of thugs, armed with automatics, rifles and repeating shot-guns. The gunmen by this time numbered at least fifty. According to witnesses, Alley said to the sheriff-who had just assured the strikers of protection-“If you don’t clear the road, I will.” Witnesses heard O’Rourke reply, “All right, go ahead!” Alley turned to the gunmen with the words, “Go and get the sons of b—-s, boys!”
The pickets had started to run when Alley gave his orders but could not escape the murderous fire of the gunmen who continued to shoot into the fleeing crowd. One wounded miner was jerked to his feet by the thugs and would have been beaten to death if he had not been rescued by the chief of the city detectives. Numbers of the strikers took refuge in a nearby boarding house but were pursued by the gunmen who shouted to the landlady “get those sons of b—-s out of there, or we’ll kill them all.” They forced their way into the house and beat horribly twenty-two of the strikers.
After the first panic some of the pickets went back and attempted to rescue the wounded men but were again fired on and forced to retreat.
The Butte Daily Bulletin got out an extra carrying a call for a mass-meeting in the hall above the Bulletin office. Press trouble caused some delay but by nine o’clock the crowd began to gather, a crowd that jammed the building and stayed until after twelve o’clock, hearing speakers tell the story of the tragedy.
The next day the troops arrived and the capitalist press, safely ensconced behind the bayonets and machine-guns of the soldiery, burst forth in denunciation of the strikers, of the murdered and wounded men, so venomous that it is entirely without parallel in journalistic annals. Its hysterical frenzy was not even exceeded by the sadistic debauch indulged in by the press after Centralia.
From that bloody affair they took their cue. A shot had been fired from a boarding-house, the same house in which the strikers took refuge, before the “deputies” began shooting, shrieked the copper-press. Pictures of the house appeared in the papers with the window from which the shot had been fired marked X. The sheriff, a cowardly tool of the Anaconda Mining Co., with the mentality of a ten-year-old child, issued a statement in which he said that it “was not a strike but a revolution.” He denied that his deputies had done any shooting. The city police denied that they had done any shooting. The press never mentioned Roy Alley and his private army but dwelt on the promiscuous shooting that followed “the shot from the boarding-house.”
The inference is that the miners shot themselves in the back.
The Associated Press of course sent out the same lying story, writing up the tragedy as an “affray,” or a “battle” between the strikers and the authorities, declaring that a soviet had been set up, and even the closing of the boot-legging dives by the miners themselves after the authorities had refused to act, was pictured as riot. The arrival of the troops allowed all of the foul pack of kept press journalists to give tongue.
It became evident that the copper-interests were preparing to launch a campaign of wholesale extermination directed against all who openly challenged their rule that the publicity was all framed to prepare the public outside of Butte for anything that might occur, to justify any crimes they might commit.
The Butte Daily Bulletin received word from an unimpeachable source that the next move of the copper-interests would be to wreck the Bulletin plant. As on many other occasions, the miners armed themselves and did guard duty in the old church that houses the Bulletin. The raid was planned for Sunday morning.
From one o’clock until after three, automobiles loaded with gunmen drove around and around the building. They went back and reported that a “raid might kill too many innocent people.” Wednesday night ten thousand Bulletin extras were sold-in a city of less than 85,000 inhabitants.
Two days before th shooting Roy Alley was heard to make the statement that “Butte needs some MORE hangings and killings,” and that “if there were enough red-blooded Americans in the camp, it would be done.” The county attorney has made no arrests. No warrants have been issued. Centralia has been duplicated. The miners know all these things. They know that there is no law to which they can appeal with any hope of justice. They know that the Bulletin is the next target of attack. The company knows that with a labor press in Montana some of their henchmen will soon pay the penalty for their crimes. They know that industrial Slavery can never be enforced in Montana while that press is in existence.
The corporations, their official tools and their army of thugs, their multitudinous organizations of businessmen, every courtesan journalist, the boot-leggers and gamblers, the underworld, all know these things.
The lines are tightly drawn. The stage is set for the second act.
That is why in Butte to-day you pass a dozen men in every block with one hand in their coat-pockets. That is why the men marked by the copper-barons go armed and ready and avoid dark places. That is why, every night in Butte, the machines filled with heavily armed mercenaries, circle the Bulletin office hour after hour in the dark still hours of the early morning. That is why, in the shadows of the Bulletin plant, the Red Guard of Butte stands every night, waiting grimly for the attack that is inevitable unless the power of publicity causes the plotters to abandon their plans. That is why the nation may soon be shocked by a tale of another attack of the wolves of capitalism on a working class institution and may be thrilled by the story of its defense.
If it occurs, the red history of Butte will take on a deeper tinge of crimson and the list of casualties will include those who are not of the workers.
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*William F. Dunne is editor of the Butte Daily Bulletin.
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