On this day in Labor History the year was 1917.
That was the day that miners in Bisbee, Arizona were rounded up, taken by train and left in the desert on the New Mexico/Arizona border.
The Phelps Dodge Corporation was one of the largest mining conglomerates in the United States, mining mostly copper.
It had a major operation in Bisbee, Arizona.
As in other mines, workplace conditions were poor.
The IWW began efforts to organize the miners, and had success organizing Mexican and Eastern European miners.
In June, the IWW presented the copper companies with a list of demands that included better working conditions and better company housing.
The copper companies refused to negotiate.
And by the end of the month about half of all miners were on strike.
Phelps Dodge decided to use the war as a pretext to crack down on the IWW.
Newspapers accused the organization of pro-German sympathy because the IWW opposed American involvement in WWI.
A group of Bisbee elites, the Citizens’ Protective League, decided to round up the Wobblies and ship them out.
In 1985, in an oral history, Walter Douglas, the grandson of Phelps-Dodge founder James Douglas, and a witness to the deportation, made light of it: saying
“So then they backed a cattle train in on that siding by the ball park, loaded them all in. . .and sent them to Columbus, New Mexico. And when they got them over there they. . . deported twelve hundred and some people. I was seven years old at that time and our house was up on a hill and I remember the baby-sitter we had taking my brother and I up there in the window and we could watch them going down Bisbee Road.”
The Bisbee deportation crushed the miners’ union and is yet another example of the workers struggle for a better tomorrow.
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Labor History in 2:00 brought to you by the Illinois Labor History Society and The Rick Smith Show