Part Four: Big Annie Clemenc and the Copper Strike of 1913

Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, the only podcast in which someone would give you a cliffhanger like the one I did on Monday. That's not true. Probably other podcasts would do that, but I don't feel good about it. I'm your host, Margaret Kildroy, and this is a podcast in which we talk about how whenever there's bad people doing bad stuff, there's people doing good stuff.

Even if the people doing good stuff are messy and complicated. Sometimes they're too spicy. Sometimes they're too mild. But at the end of the day, there's people trying to do good stuff. And they deserve support. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. And this is part four of our four-parter. You have made it. Oh, you've made it to the end of the strike. Well, you will have made it to the end of the strike if you listen to the end of this episode. And... I promised you tragedy, so I'm going to provide you tragedy. Where we last left our heroes, 15,000 workers had gone off the job and they had been fighting tooth and nail, guns and blood on both sides, trying to stop people from breaking their strike, trying just

to get the bosses to talk to them, trying to just be treated as anything like a peer by the copper barons of Kiniwa Peninsula. And that's a tongue twister. I think I blame the word peninsula most of all for that particular tongue twister. Also, I think I can finally say that at the end of writing all 12,000 or so words of this particular script, that I can spell the word peninsula. But I can't spell the word quinoa.

Not yet. I'm working on it. I am going to accomplish it one day. Oh, I'm procrastinating telling you what happens next. Where we last left our heroes. There was a children's Christmas party, and all the kids were getting presents. At 4.40 p.m., a short, stout man came up the stairs in a hurry, with his hat pulled low and his collar pulled up. He waved his arms excitedly. He shouted, Fire!

People looked up at him. It was time to shout it again. He yelled, Fire! Fire! And the kids took up the call. And the room panicked. There was hundreds and hundreds of kids packed into this room. Annie and presumably others tried to calm the room to tell them it was a false alarm. There was no smoke. There was no fire. Another woman went to the piano and began to play to try to calm everyone down. But the kids stampeded for the front exit regardless. And it killed them. Some kids tripped and fell when they reached the doors. and then in the press of the other kids behind them, they all end up locked into place and tangled. There's a Woody Guthrie song about this incident, and it's incorrect. The mine owners weren't outside, or lackeys

weren't outside, holding the doors shut. His version of events was based on the words of a communist journalist who claimed to be at the party, but wasn't. Unfortunately, it doesn't take that level of evil commit that level of evil. They didn't need to hold the door shut. It was just panicked kids. You don't have to hold the door shut to murder them. Stampedes will do it too. There are evocative descriptions of the scene from the first man who arrived, the man who ran the downstairs store of children tangled and screaming and suffocating and dying. And I'm I'm not going to read it to you. Every now and then I run across the, like, I am not a true crime podcast moments, and this is one of them.

If you want to read it, it is breathtakingly sad. And I found it in Lyndon Comstock's book that I talked about last week, Annie Clemens and the Great Kiniwa Copper Strike. It's a good book. It's on page 88. It's a scene worse than you'll see in a horror movie. It is, frankly, stuck with me. Rescuers arrived fast. The firefighters were there in 10 minutes. It is not a big town. They opened the doors. They couldn't get anyone out from the ground floor. They had to climb the fire escape to start pulling people out from the back of the pile. 73 people died. 59 of them were children.

All of them were from immigrant communities. 50 of them Finnish. This is one of the highest body counts of any mass murder in U.S. history, and remains the largest in Michigan history. And I'll say one thing to tug at your heartstrings, because it tugged at mine. Some of the survivors were saved by adults who died. Adults who held children above their heads as they themselves were crushed to death.

Adults like Abram and Elizabeth Niamala, who'd been married for two years before they died. Elizabeth held their only child, Raynaud, above her head. Several witnesses saw that the man who called fire was wearing a Citizens Alliance badge, you know, like a political pin, a button with text on it, not a badge, like a police badge. One witness, who was largely ignored because he was a kid, said that he'd seen the man before, that he was a professional strikebreaker.

It's possible that one of the professional strikebreakers, one of the gangsters from New York City potentially, put on a Citizens Alliance badge before running in to cause this panic to make sure that everyone stayed mad at each other, right? That could be the false flag of it, is that one of the anti-strike side pretending to be another of the anti-strike side. That's possible. The man was never caught because the police never looked for him because, frankly, the police probably knew who he was. The police might have put him up to it. The most likely suspect was a professional strikebreaker named Edward Manley, who does not deserve his last name. Why do I suspect Edward Manley? Because when the rescuers extricated people from the stairwell, there was

one anti-union person present in that stairwell, Edward Manley. The most likely story is that he was caught up in the throng of the children he murdered and survived by chance. He's only mentioned in passing in the news. The local news called him a hero for being one of the adults in the stairwell, as though he'd been there to help people. After that, he disappeared off the pages of history.

He could not realistically have been an anti-union person who heard about bad stuff happening and rushed to help, simply because we know that both the first person on the scene, the downstairs shopkeeper, and later the firefighters were unable to enter through the front of the stairwell. So he only could have come in from the top of the stairs.

He had to have been present. And he's disappeared off the pages of history. The Citizens Alliance immediately raised money for the victims, $ 25, 000 for the families of the victims. The families refused to touch what they called blood money. Anti-union press says that the union threatened them that they were to take that money. And that's possible. But it feels a lot more likely to me that the families weren't about to just turn around and take a bribe from the people who just fucking murdered their kids. The inquest into the fire was a laughable thing. The state didn't even bring interpreters. They actually did during some of the previous incidents, but they didn't bother to even bring interpreters because they didn't want to know. They didn't care.

When I say the state, I actually don't mean the federal or the Michigan state. I mean the local authorities. The local authorities didn't want to know who did it. They were too busy arresting anyone who called the whole thing murder. I'm not even joking. There was a kind of nearby Finnish socialist paper, Taiomais, which described the incident as murder. The entire staff of the newspaper was arrested as a result. And if you're thinking, isn't there a famous line about how yelling fire in a crowded theater is the logical limit of free speech? Well, ironically... there is, and it was originally an anti-socialist thing. Because of the 1913 Italian Hall disaster, the thing I just told you about, and a 1911 false fire alarm in Pennsylvania at an

opera house that killed, I believe, 26 people, it became a sort of trope in society at the time that an example of a dastardly thing to do is to falsely yell fire in a crowded theater. It's like a Almost a meme. Not to go do it, but if you're like, I want to describe someone as a bad fucking person in the media. You have them like show up twirling their mustache and going, fire or whatever, right?

And so that's in the air. Then in 1917, the socialist Eugene Debs gave a talk in Ohio and he was arrested for it. It was a speech against complying with the draft in World War I. One of the main early attacks on leftist free speech was the first Red Scare that was built more or less around this issue.

And Deb's defense in court was, free speech, motherfuckers. He probably didn't say motherfuckers, but his defense in court was like, yeah, it's free speech, I can say this shit if I want to. And the court said, of course there was a limit to free speech, like yelling fire in a crowded theater. Never mind that the actual example of that, with the highest death count, was used to kill socialists.

Debs got 10 years for sedition, and at his sentencing, he said one of the best things anyone has ever said. Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it. And while there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. Yeah.

End quote. While there is a lower class, I am in it. And while there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. Just true today as it was 108 years ago. I also find, in etymology with Margaret Gildroy, in this case, I didn't even look it up, so I'm probably fucking wrong. I find it interesting that the word mean in this context, than the meanest on earth, means kind of like the people who have it the hardest, right?

And like the meanest lowdown man, in a way, is like the rough and tumble man, the poor man, you know? Like a mean and meager meal is like a sparse meal. And I think it's interesting that the word mean, like to be mean to somebody, seems to come from that. Again, I didn't look up this etymology. I'm riffing here. I think there's an interesting acknowledgement in that like, it's a lot harder to be polite when you're fucking hungry. Just is.

It's a lot harder to not want to steal from people when you're like fucking hungry. And so there's a massive, massive moral difference between A broke person who steals and robs and kills and does horrible, mean, nasty shit. And the rulers of this planet who are the billionaires who do all of that at scale who aren't called mean.

But do you know what will never be mean to you? Do you know what will always... No, none of it will have your best interest at heart. We actually have no control over the ads. Here's the ads. And we're back. Rather than slow down their attacks after killing a fuckton of children, the anti-union forces stayed on the offensive. Even before the bodies were in the ground, two days later on December 26th, a Citizens Alliance gang stormed the hotel room of Charles Moyer, the president of the Western Federation of Miners. They shot him and they put him on a train out of town. and said that if he showed up again, that they'd kill him. I think he ends up in a hospital in Chicago as a result of this. And when a grand jury met to determine

if they should indict the Citizens Alliance members who shot and ran out Moyer, they instead indicted Moyer for conspiracy. The jury, the grand jury, was made up of Citizens Alliance members. So basically they were like, ah, not only did we not do anything wrong, but actually the guy we shot, he fucking had it coming, you know? Am I right? They were not right. And so then the people of the copper country, the serfs of the copper barons, had to bury their children. This whole thing sounds like a fairy tale, honestly. And, you know, in this snowy land, the serfs of the copper barons had to bury their children.

But it's all real. The funeral was quite likely the largest public gathering to date in Kiniwa history. 15,000 or 20,000 people marched in the funeral procession, as thousands more watched on. The parents were at the front, then the striking women, then the miners. They marched for miles. Every available hearse was in use, and the remaining coffins were carried by teams of pallbearers for mile after mile, switching teams to carry the dead children. Most of the Finns were buried in two long trenches, too poor for individual plots or headstones. Most of their graves are unmarked to this day. And for me... When I think about this, the only thing that I can hold on to is the same thing that I hold on to whenever I

have to cope with the death of a child. We can't measure the value of a life by its length, if indeed we can measure it at all. And a labor attorney gave an address at the funeral that included the following, quote, There has been some criticism as to the conduct of the survivors who refuse charity. It is not charity we want. It is justice. And gentlemen, these men and these women who are the most grief-stricken people here today are not to be blamed because they will not accept charity from their opponents. Here, the enemies have threatened their leaders, shot and deported the president of the organization, Mr. Moyer.

You cannot rid organized labor from among American workers by striking or killing any man because in his stead another will rise up to take his place, more powerful than the one before. I think, dear friends, that these bodies here in this cemetery today, cut down in their young childhood, ought to be sufficient appeal to Mr. Shaw to meet his men in arbitration, which is all the strikers ask, and in some measure atone for this sadness which has been experienced here for five months. Because again, and I can't stress this enough, while the miners wanted, like real things, They wanted to make the modern equivalent of $ 100 a day and better working conditions and less child labor. All they were formally asking for was to fucking sit down

and talk the entire time. Meanwhile, one of these barons said, quote, grass would grow in the streets of Calumet before he would negotiate with the workers. He was absolutely willing to gamble it all in order to maintain his grasp on power. And these bloody couple days in December were frankly the end of the strike, though no one knew it yet.

I hate to call what happened a tragedy because it was murder both legally and morally. So I won't say in the wake of such a tragedy, things changed. But in the wake of such an overwhelmingly terrible thing, things changed. When the going gets real real in a social movement, Things often go a certain way that's not very good.

It polarizes people. The hardcore get more hardcore. The rest drop out. This is actually why, in many ways, the Western Federation of Miners, when they come in and say, like, no, don't shoot back, right? Why they're probably on to something strategically is that we've talked about it before on the show.

You have what I'll call the clandestinity spiral. which is that people will start with these above-ground protests, even if they're spicy and they demand a lot. And then as they face more and more repression, people respond to that repression by fighting back against that repression. And that tension...

will polarize the movement, and the larger chunk of it will drop out, and the hardcore will get more hardcore, become clandestine, and that tends to be where social movements fail. There are exceptions to this. This is what happened in the 1905 revolution in Russia, where only some portion of people stayed keeping it real and fighting and shooting and blowing stuff up and all that against the czar, while the vast majority, the revolution did end, and so the clandestinity failed. The clandestine folks became more and more isolated from society. I think the primary difference there, besides, of course, just sort of like the cultural differences of being in Russia, is that a larger chunk of people and multiple factions

of people were part of that clandestine struggle. So it was actually instead like a more essentially literal vanguard. And it is what led to the 1917 revolution. It seems likely to me anyway. Okay. When things get real, it polarizes people. And, you know, the Finns shooting up that house could have done it, wasn't quite enough. But the murder of all these children, that seemed to be enough.

While Annie Clemens was telling the newspapers we would rather die than surrender, the majority of striking workers realized they'd rather surrender than die. And that they might just die if they don't surrender. Not just because their children will be murdered, although obviously showing that The other side is perfectly willing to murder their children and act callous about it.

I'm sure it doesn't help. But specifically, that they need food in order to live. And more and more workers were already leaving the strike and going to different parts of the country in order to go work. It was basically a moment where either everyone was going to arm themselves or they were going to give up. And it's possible...

That armed themselves en masse at that point might have worked without all of the, like, sort of enforced nonviolence of the Western Federation of Miners. It's not the most likely thing. It's just possible. A few months later in Colorado, miners would go the armed themselves route. Then more famously still in 1921 at the Battle of Blair Mountain, armed white and black and immigrant and U.S.-born miners would take up arms in the largest insurgency the U.S. has seen since the Civil War. But Again, famously, neither of those were clear victories. I've covered the Battle of Blair Mountain, and I'm going to cover the Battle of Colorado Mine Wars more extensively. Just haven't yet. There's an infinite amount

of stuff. For whatever reason, arming themselves wasn't the route most of these particular folks took. For Annie and some others, they were like, this is a fight to the death. This isn't that they went to go get armed, but that they wanted to keep up the strike. They were like, we're going to fucking get socialism or at least some fucking better pay or we're all going to fucking get gunned down and starved and suffocated and crushed. But most people backed off. Her brother, 73 years later, told a magazine, quote, She was never the same after the tragedy of the strike and the Italian Hall. She never forgave. She didn't like to talk about the strike and the Italian Hall disaster.

It was a real sore spot with her. but she always thought it was Citizens' Alliance that was responsible. She said, I was there. I know what happened. You know how soldiers are about the war? How they saw such horrible things that they just won't talk about it? Well, that's how Annie was. She didn't want to talk about it.

But do you know what I want to talk about? That's not true. What I am willing to talk about, because it puts a roof over my head and feeds my dog, The fact that we're sponsored by advertisers. Like these ones. And we're back. Annie got sick on January 4th. Very sick. Likely, it was sort of a my-body-gives-up-before-my-soul-is-willing-to-rest kind of thing. I don't know if you're familiar with that kind of vibe yourself, where you're like, I'm going to keep going, and your body's like, fuck you, I'm done.

After years of organizing with a relief fund that pays benefits to people when they're too sick to work, for the very first time, Big Annie drew on that fund for about a month. Except, instead of being able to just stay home and rest, in the middle of January 1914, she had to serve her 10 days in prison for hitting a scab with an umbrella. Meanwhile, her marriage was falling apart. Her useless drunk Joe, who drank through her $ 200 savings, had been hitting her probably freak years. And she was over it. Some of the Amazon reviews. It's worth reading. There's a brilliant one-star review of the Big Annie book. And it's like, she wasn't perfect. She was a philanderer and a communist or whatever. And I'm like, oh, fuck,

I forget people like that still exist. They still exist, and of course they write Amazon reviews. Like, I'm not saying it's good to cheat on people, but, like, it's worse to hit people that you're dating. Like, we all know that, right? So she's over it. And besides, a handsome socialist journalist from Chicago had been in town covering the strike, and she had probably started sleeping with him and was pregnant with probably his child. And so when Joe threatened to shoot her for her philandering... That was enough for her, and she left him for good. She was probably trying to get out of that relationship for a while anyway. And then here comes this opportunity to get out of a terrible situation. And as the men's

spirits were flagging, women picked up the slack. Men were dropping off the strike and moving away. About a third of the union miners had left to find work elsewhere, including Annie's own father. A whole new women's local started up in the last months of the strike. And women saw it as their job to keep their husbands and fathers and sons in the fight. Just hold on till spring, they argued. Because in spring, it was going to be way easier to import scabs into the snow capital of the Midwest. So at that point, we're kind of lost.

But for now, in the winter, don't give up in the winter. Even the state and federal government had both tried to intervene at this point. had gone to management and been like, could you please just fucking talk to your workers? Like there was a whole federal investigation into the Italian Hall Massacre and like the state and federal government, credit where it's due, were like, well, this seems bad.

Why don't you just fucking talk to them? It's just a fucking union. And the Barons were like, no, we're not going to talk to them. We're fucking Barons. So in February, newly sort of single and pregnant, Big Annie took off on tour, with Ella Bloor, that labor journalist who lied about being president of the Italian Hall Massacre.

And no one ever just says she lied about her. They just say euphemistic things like, well, it couldn't have been true that she was there. She lied. She lied about being there because she wanted to make a political propaganda point. And since she believes in authoritarian communism, it doesn't matter to her whether or not her side is true.

She just wants to fucking whatever. Anyway. Big Annie took off on tour. And though thousands of people came to see her talk, and she gets the moniker, the Joan of Arc of Calamette, the tour isn't raising funds effectively. It brings in just about as much as it costs to run the tour. Like it like cost a couple thousand dollars and they brought in a couple thousand dollars. Meanwhile, while she's in Chicago, she helps a waitress strike organize.

And basically she sees a waitress strike and she's like, why aren't y'all yelling on the picket line? Like, why are you just kind of hanging out? Like, you got to yell at the scabs and you got to yell at the customers. And basically, she's like, you got to start beating up scabs. What the fuck are you doing?

But she doesn't hack it on the tour circuit. She leaves early. We can only conjecture why. She said it was because she missed her husband. But she was in the process of leaving him for another man. So that's not true. Maybe she wanted to get that settled and done with. Maybe she wasn't a fan of Ella Bloor.

I know very little about Ella Bloor, but I... Can't handle people who lie to the people that they're trying to motivate into doing things. So I also don't think very highly of Ella Bloor. Maybe Big Annie loved Ella Bloor. I don't fucking know. I think mostly she left the tour because she wasn't trying to become famous. She was trying to help the strike. She was 100% in it for the fight. She's not trying to become a fucking influencer.

She just wanted to draw attention to a cause. She was getting famous, but she wasn't raising money. So she said, fuck it, I'm going home. She came back just in time to see the strike formally fail. The women had successfully pushed the men to wait until spring, but the barons wouldn't budge. On April 12th, the miners voted to abandon the strike, about 3,000 to 1,600. Considering there had been 9,000 people in the union at the start, that means they'd lost half their members. Ironically, as sort of a consolation prize, workers in the area mines won the eight-hour day and better grievance protocols. Likely, though they wouldn't ever want to admit it, the strike had spooked the barons, and they calculated what was the very least they could

do to never have to have that happen again. The most active striking miners were blacklisted and never hired back. The blacklists might have spread out west, and those miners might never have worked in a mine again. Mostly, workers went to Detroit to work in the industry there. Joe, Annie's now ex-husband, he went there. That finished socialist paper moved to Wisconsin. The population of the Kiniwa Peninsula went down by 16,000 people after the strike. Big Annie, for her part, she moved to Chicago and married that journalist Frank just before their kid Dot was born. Presumably it's his kid, and she put his name on the birth certificate.

But she'd left one kind of drunken, abusive asshole for another. Joe had been the blue-collar socialist sort who drank away her savings and hit her. Frank, it turned out, was the kind of socialist who talked haughty theory and ran a newspaper and hung out with elite socialists and drank too much and hit her. She left him, too, eventually.

She married a third man. She worked in a factory sewing men's hats. And it's clear when you visit the Keweenaw Peninsula that the 1913 strike is the single most important event of the region's history. Which is interesting because rural America is not famously particularly leftist or even Democrat anymore.

If you look at a voting map of Michigan, though, it's the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula that stands out purple, even bluish to this day. There is a cultural memory there that lingers. I actually heard from a listener who lives there that they're going to be unveiling a big Annie statue. in the near future, or maybe it even already happened. And that's pretty exciting. The strikers lost objectively, but they also just actually refused to be treated like shit.

And the more I read history, the more I understand that we don't win or lose battle by battle, but war by war. And there's no permanent victory, no permanent defeat. Every decent thing we have in this world exists because of people like Big Annie, and the 15,000 other strikers. And it exists despite the best efforts of the barons, and despite the moral weakness of the scabs. Because together, we bargain. Alone, we beg. Don't cross picket lines. Not even when it's hard not to. Take care of each other.

and we'll all be part of the fight that makes this world livable and yeah I'm Margaret Kiljoy I have a newsletter margaretkiljoy.substack.com I post every week this week as I record this so last week as you're listening and I posted about all the people who've smashed up flock cameras and how what drives social change is when large numbers of people stand behind the people committing criminal behavior.

Fun stuff like that. You can check it out there. Almost everything I post there is free. Also, there is a new show on the Cool Zone Media Network by James Stout. It's called Natural Causes, and it's about outside stuff. I'm really excited about it. James is an amazing journalist and podcaster. And yeah, you can check it out wherever you listen to this. Take care of each other. Fuck ICE.

Free Palestine. Be well. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Part Four: Big Annie Clemenc and the Copper Strike of 1913

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