It was 25 years ago this month, while working as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Michigan, I met Elma Damrell. She was 79 years old at the time and residing in a nursing home in the western Upper Peninsula.
Me? I was just a young reporter who had not much to show except a couple of stories I had written in an obscure alternative newspaper called the Michigan Voice run by some guy named Michael Moore out of a humble abode at the intersection of Genessee and Davison roads in Flint.
But Elma, she had an amazing story to share, from when she was a young girl in Calumet, Michigan, a copper mining town on the Keweenaw Peninsula.
She told me about a Christmas Eve party she attended when she was just 4 years old, at a place called the Italian Hall. It was held to bring some cheer to the children of striking copper miners who had been out of work for months.
It's a night she remembered for the rest of her life.
But perhaps I should let Woody Guthrie help tell the story along with me …
1913 Massacre
By Woodie Guthrie
Take a trip with me in 1913,
To Calumet, Michigan, in the copper country.
I will take you to a place called Italian Hall,
Where the miners are having their big Christmas ball.
BRIEF NOTE: Thanks. My first time on the Rec list for a few years!
I used to be a regular there. I need to stop slacking!
But this is an important event in U.S. labor history and must be remembered.
The Copper Range in the beautiful, jagged finger of land that sticks out into Lake Superior from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a true marvel of nature. Almost pure copper in vast quantities could be found in the fissures and faults of the Precambrian shield of the North American continent. Centuries ago, copper was mined by Native Americans and some even found its way, through trading networks, to the Aztecs.
Mining on an industrial scale started there in the 1850s, and soon investors in Boston were raking in huge profits, employing immigrants from Italy, Finland, Wales and elsewhere in the dangerous work of extracting the raw wealth from the bottom of deep, dark shafts.
You ask about work and you ask about pay,
They'll tell you they make less than a dollar a day,
Working the copper claims, risking their lives,
So it's fun to spend Christmas with children and wives.
In 1913 the Copper Range was the scene of a bitter strike as the Western Federation of Miners organized the miners in opposition to the introduction of a new one-man drill, which Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. had brought in to replace two-man machines.
The union argued that the new drill was unsafe and since it weighed 150 pounds, was more exhausting to operate.
The walkout began on July 23, 1913, idling some 14,528 miners and another 1,500 mill and smelter workers on the Copper Range, according to an account by historian Angus Murdock. Think about those numbers for a minute. This was a huge strike. The Copper Range was shut down.
The strike dragged on into the winter months and by December, things took a violent turn.
Mining company guards chased a picketer from the plant gate to a boarding house. The guards fired into the house, killing two men. Although the guards claimed they had been fired upon from inside the house, no weapons were found inside.
On Dec. 7, 1913, in an apparent retribution, three Canadians who had recently been brought in by the mining company to replace the striking miners were gunned down as they slept in another boarding house, and soon after, yet another shootout left one striker and one mining company guard dead.
With the striking miners and their families facing a harsh winter, in stepped the women’s auxiliary of the WFM, led by the legendary “Tall Annie” Clemenc (photo). They organized a Christmas Eve party for the children of the miners, to be held at the Italian Hall, on the second floor of a downtown Calumet saloon.
The women had gathered gifts for the kids — mostly gloves, scarves and mittens, essential for the North Country winter.
The hall was crowded — an estimated 500 children and 175 parents. The party began without incident, with the children singing “Hark the Herald” and Kris Kringle making an appearance.
But then something went terribly wrong.
There's talking and laughing and songs in the air,
And the spirit of Christmas is there everywhere,
Before you know it you're friends with us all,
And you're dancing around and around in the hall.
Well a little girl sits down by the Christmas tree lights,
To play the piano so you gotta keep quiet,
To hear all this fun you would not realize,
That the copper boss' thug men are milling outside.
Seventy-five years later, Elma Damrell told me her father was suspicious that strike-breakers would try to cause trouble.
“My father forbade my mother from sending us kids, but she insisted,” Elma told me in December 1988. Elma recalled that Christmas presents were being distributed at the party when the shout of “Fire!” rang out.
The copper boss' thugs stuck their heads in the door,
One of them yelled and he screamed, "there's a fire,"
A lady she hollered, "there's no such a thing.
Keep on with your party, there's no such thing."
A few people rushed and it was only a few,
"It's just the thugs and the scabs fooling you,"
A man grabbed his daughter and carried her down,
But the thugs held the door and he could not get out.
Panic-stricken children rushed into the stairway and were either tripped or pushed in the panic.
There were also conflicting reports over whether the door at the bottom of the stairs, which unfortunately opened inward, was shut by someone on the outside.
Regardless, soon the small stairwell was a scene of horror as it filled with a suffocating mass of small bodies.
Before anyone realized the seriousness of the situation, 73 persons, 57 of them children, had died.
The bodies were packed so tightly into the stairwell that would-be rescuers were unable to pull them out from the bottom. The outside door was removed by its hinges, but the bodies had to be removed by pulling them from the top of the stairs.
And then others followed, a hundred or more,
But most everybody remained on the floor,
The gun thugs they laughed at their murderous joke,
While the children were smothered on the stairs by the door.
“One of my brothers was swept away with the crowd,” Elma said, and her mother was terrified, unable to find him in the confusion.
With the only stairwell blocked, children and adults were evacuated from the upstairs by planks extended to windows of a neighboring building, across which young Elma crawled, sobbing.
Elma said she, her brother and her mother went home crying “and dad went back to find my other brother among the bodies,” which by then had been laid out on the sidewalk outside the Italian Hall.
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 were seventy-three.
Elma recalled that her dad returned at about 3 a.m., with Elma’s brother Bill still missing. Finally her dad returned to the hospital and found the boy, his head wrapped in bandages.
“We didn’t get any gifts that year but we were so glad to have Bill there,” she said.
Suspicion fell on the Citizens Alliance, an organization of conservative business interests opposed to the strike.
Several witnesses claimed a man with a Citizens Alliance button caused the panic, and one witness claimed to have seen the mysterious man drop an object at the top of the stairs that caused the panicked children to trip.
On Dec. 26, 1913 Western Federation of Miners union president Charles Moyer, after refusing to retract his claim that the Citizens Alliance was to blame for the tragedy, was beaten, shot in the back, dragged through the street and put on a train (deported) by City of Calumet detectives.
Moyer was told he would be publicly hanged if he ever came back.
At this point, national guard troops were called in and a Congressional investigation launched.
Rep. Taylor of Colorado described the Michigan Copper Range as “a little kingdom and James McNaughton, president of the Calumet and Hecla, is king.”
The mining company for decades was reputed to have the largest police force in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
But the eventual congressional committee report faulted both sides in the strike and bloodshed.
The strike ended in April 1914, with the union conceding to the inevitable single-man drill. It was a setback for the Western Federation of Miners, but in the long run, labor won better working conditions and wages.
Back in 1988 I spoke with an old timer from Calumet named Jack Foster. He wasn’t very lucid at his advanced age, frankly, but he still recalled the 1913 strike, when Calumet was turned into “an armed camp.”
As for Elma, she recalled that conditions for miners like her dad in Calumet in 1913 were intolerable, with workers paid $2.50 for a 10-hour day. During the strike her family survived by selling milk from four cows. Her dad later quit working in the mines after an accident killed three of his friends.
The death certificates for the 73 people killed on the night of Dec. 24, 1913 in Calumet, Mich., blame “persons unknown.”
Back in 1988, Elma told me that she still keeps in touch with a childhood friend who was also at the Italian Hall that Christmas Eve in 1913.
“She still sleeps with her light on,” Elma said.
The piano played a slow funeral tune,
And the town was lit up by a cold Christmas moon,
The parents they cried and the miners they moaned,
"See what your greed for money has done."
I should note that PBS is planning to air a documentary called “Red Metal: The Copper Country Strike of 1913-14,” Tuesday, Dec. 17. Check your local listings!