1913 Massacre

DESCRIPTION: In Calumet, Michigan, striking copper miners and their children are having a Christmas celebration; strike-breakers outside bar the doors then raise a false fire alarm. In the ensuing stampede, seventy-three children are crushed or suffocated
AUTHOR: Woody Guthrie
EARLIEST DATE: 1945 (recording by author)
KEYWORDS: lie strike death labor-movement mining disaster children
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Dec 24, 1913 - The 1913 Massacre
FOUND IN: US
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Greenway-AmericanFolksongsOfProtest, pp. 157-158, "1913 Massacre"
Silber/Silber-FolksingersWordbook, p. 306, "The 1913 Massacre" (1 text)
DT, MASS1913*
Roud #17663
RECORDINGS:
Woody Guthrie, "1913 Massacre" (Asch 360, 1945; on Struggle1, Struggle2)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "One Morning in May (To Hear the Nightingale Sing)" (tune)
NOTES [527 words]: In the late 19th/early 20th century, the rapid expansion of the electrical industry created great demand for copper, for which the chief source was the mines in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Bitter strikes resulted as the miners, under the leadership of the Western Federation of Miners, demanded decent pay and safer working conditions.
Guthrie's description of the events of 1913 is dead-on accurate, according to the residents of Calumet; Italian Hall, where the disaster occurred, was still standing in the early 1980s, but has since been torn down. - PJS
There is an historical marker on the site (Italian Hall, 7th Street, Calumet, MI, at its junction with Elm Street, one block south of Highway 203), and the site has not been built over. One of the plaques has a picture of Woody and mentions this song. There are quite a few recent photos of the site on Google Maps.
Arthur W. Thurner, Strangers and Sojourners: A History of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, Wayne State University Press, 1994, puts the Massacre in the contest of the nine month conflict between miners associated with the Western Federation of Miners and the mining companies. On p. 213, he describes the Massacre (the town known as "Calumet" was then called "Red Jacket"; the "Citizens' Alliance" was an anti-miner group funded by the mining companies):
:On December 24 [1913]... The women's auxiliary of the Western Federation [of Miners] entertaied hundreds of children and their parents at an afternoon party at Red Jacket's Italian Hall. More than 500 children and about 175 adults had gathered to hear carols, recitations, and receive gifts. In the noise and confusion, as children moved toward the stage where auxiliary members tried to quiet them, an ominous cry of 'Fire' rang out. In the panic that followed, seventy-three lost their lives, trampled in the stairway leading out as an avalanche of terrified men, women, and children cascaded down. Those who fell first could not regain their footing and were trampled to death.
"There was no fire, but soon whistles pierce the December darkness of late afternoon. Firemen as well as others (some wearing Citizens' Alliance buttons), arrived to help take bodies to the Red Jacket Town Hall where a temporary morgue had been arranged. Hysterical adults inside the hall believed the Citizen's Alliance had come to attack them. Several later spoke of an intruder wearing a Citizens' Alliance badge, who entered and uttered the fatal cry."
For some of the long-term effects of the Massacre, see the notes on the recent song "Keweenaw Light."
Unlike a lot of major labor uprisings, the Copper Country strike seems to have left a thin record. As best I can tell, the only books really devoted to it are another book by Arthur W. Thurner, Rebels on the Range The Michigan Copper Miners' Strike of 1913-1914, John H. Forster Press, 1999, and Steve Lehto, Death's Door: The Truth Behind Michigan's Largest Mass Murder, Momentum Books, 2006. There is a book by Daniel Wolff called Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913, HarperCollins, 2017. I have not seen it.- RBW
Last updated in version 7.2
File: FSWB306A

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