The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) was a labor union that gained a reputation for militancy in the mines of the western United States and British Columbia. Its efforts to organize both hard rock miners and smelter workers brought it into sharp conflicts – and often pitched battles – with both employers and governmental authorities. One of the most dramatic of these struggles occurred in the Cripple Creek district of Colorado in 1903–1904; the conflicts were thus dubbed the Colorado Labor Wars. The WFM also played a key role in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 but left that organization several years later.
The WFM changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (more familiarly referred to as Mine Mill) in 1916. After a period of decline it revived in the early days of the New Deal and helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. The Mine Mill union was expelled from the CIO in 1950 during the post-war red scare for refusing to shed its Communist leadership. After spending years fighting off efforts by the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) to raid its membership, Mine Mill and the Canadian Auto Workers merged in 1967 and were able to retain the name Mine Mill Local 598.
Founding
After hard rock miners made sporadic and often unsuccessful efforts to organize during previous decades, the Western Federation of Miners was established on May 15, 1893.John M. O'Neill, "Western Federation of Miners," American Labor Union Journal, vol. 1, no. 48 (Sept. 3, 1903), pg. 14. The federation was formed through the merger of several miners' unions representing copper miners from Butte, Montana, silver and lead miners from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, gold miners from Colorado, and hard rock miners from South Dakota and Utah at a five-day convention held in Butte, Montana. First president of the organization was John Gilligan and W.J. Weeks was the union's first secretary-treasurer.
Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin have written,
The Western Federation of Miners was frontier unionism, the organization of workers who had become "wage slaves" of mining corporations rather recently acquired by back-east absentee ownership. They built their union when they were not yet "broken in" to the discipline of business management. [The WFM] had the militancy of the undisciplined recruits ... From the founding of the Western Federation in 1893, its story for twelve years is that of a continuous search for solidarity ...Thompson, Fred W. and Murfin, Patrick. The IWW: Its First Seventy Years. Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1976, p. 9.
The miners who formed the union had already experienced a number of hard-fought battles with mine owners and governmental authorities: in the Coeur d'Alene strike in February 1892, after company guards shot five strikers to death, the miners disarmed the guards and marched more than a hundred strikebreakers out of town. In response Governor N.B. Willey asked for federal troops to restore order; President Benjamin Harrison sent General John Schofield, who declared martial law, arrested 600 strikers and then held them in a stockade prison without the right to trial, bail or habeas corpus.Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pp. 50. Schofield then ordered local mine owners to discharge any union members they had rehired.
During the confrontation, the Coeur d'Alene miners received considerable assistance from the Butte Miners' Union in Butte, Montana, who mortgaged their buildings to send aid.Michael P. Malone, William L. Lang, The Battle for Butte, 2006, page 77.
There was a growing concern that local unions were vulnerable to the power of Mine Owners' Associations like the one in Coeur d'Alene. In May 1893, about forty delegates from northern hard rock mining camps met in Butte, and established the Western Federation of Miners, which sought to organize miners throughout the West.A History of American Labor, Joseph G. Rayback, 1966, page 233.
History Cripple Creek, Colorado strike of 1894
Violence occurred in later strikes as well. At Cripple Creek, Colorado, after mine owners increased the working day from eight hours to ten, miners dynamited mine buildings and equipment. The county sheriff hired thousands of armed deputies, and then lost control of them. This 1894 struggle was one of the few strikes in which a state militia was called out to protect striking miners from an armed group supporting mine owners. Further violence was averted by the owners' agreement to return to the eight-hour day and improve miners' pay to three dollars a day – the standard that the union fought for across the west from that point forward. That success enabled the WFM to expand dramatically over the next decade, to the point where it had over two hundred locals in thirteen states.
Leadville, Colorado strike of 1896–97
However, a struggle against mine owners in Leadville served to radicalize WFM leadership.
Representatives of the Cloud City Miners' Union (CCMU), Local 33 of the Western Federation of Miners, asked for a wage increase of fifty cents per day for all mine workers not already making three dollars per day.William Philpott, The Lessons of Leadville, Colorado Historical Society, 1995, pages 2. The union felt justified, for fifty cents a day had been cut from the miners' wages during the depression of 1893.Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble, 1997, page 211. Negotiations broke down and 968 miners walked out. Mine owners, who had formed a Mine Owners' Association with a secret anti-union agreement,William Philpott, The Lessons of Leadville, Colorado Historical Society, 1995, pages 2,31, and 97, in reference to the Report of the Joint Special Legislative Committee, 693. locked out another 1,332 mine workers.William Philpott, The Lessons of Leadville, Colorado Historical Society, 1995, page 2.
The owners hired labor spies to spy on the union, and additional spies to report on replacement workers.William Philpott, The Lessons of Leadville, Colorado Historical Society, 1995, pages 7–8.
Just days after union leaders publicly warned against violence,William Philpott, The Lessons of Leadville, Colorado Historical Society, 1995, pages 75,118. a violent incident occurred at the Coronado Mine.William Philpott, The Lessons of Leadville, Colorado Historical Society, 1995, pages 1–4. At least four union miners and one fireman were killed.William Philpott, The Lessons of Leadville, Colorado Historical Society, 1995, pages 4–5. Colorado Governor McIntire sent the Colorado National Guard to Leadville.
Short-lived alliance with the American Federation of Labor
The WFM affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in 1896, but WFM delegates came away from the AFL convention in Cincinnati,
...not only disappointed with the refusal to aid their big fight in Leadville, but with a feeling that they had not been associating with union men, or with men possessing the moral or intellectual fibre ever to become good union men.Thompson, Fred W. and Murfin, Patrick. The IWW: Its First Seventy Years. Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1976, p. 10.
The WFM withdrew from the AFL the following year. With the support of other organizations, including the State Trades and Labor Council of Montana, which issued a proposition to organize a new federation, the WFM created its own alternative to the AFL, the Western Labor Union (WLU). The WLU was formed in 1898 at a convention in Salt Lake City. Its goal was organizing all workers in the West.
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho confrontation of 1899
Another confrontation in Coeur d'Alene was marked by violence.
The profitable Bunker Hill Mining Company at Wardner, IdahoJ. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble, 1997, page 111. fired seventeen workers believed to be union members. On April 29, 250 angry miners seized a train and rode it to a $250,000 mill at the Bunker Hill Mine in Wardner. The miners then set off three thousand pounds of dynamite in the mill.Roughneck—The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 53–54.
At Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg's request, President William McKinley sent the military to indiscriminately round up 1,000 men and put them into bullpens.J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble, 1997, page 141.
Emma Langdon, a union sympathizer, charged in a 1908 book that Governor Steunenberg deposited $35,000 into his bank account within a week after troops arrived in the Coeur d'Alene district, implying that there may have been a bribe from the mine operators.Labor's Greatest Conflicts, Emma F. Langdon, 1908, page 17. J. Anthony Lukas later confirmed the donation in his book Big Trouble,
In 1899, when the state needed money for the Coeur d'Alene prosecutions, the Mine Owners' Association had come up with $32,000—about a third of it from Bunker Hill and Sullivan—handing $25,000 over to Governor Steunenberg for use at his discretion in the prosecution. Some of this money went to pay [attorneys].J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble, 1997, page 351.
Idaho miners were held for "months of imprisonment in the 'bull-pen' — a structure unfit to house cattle – enclosed in a high barbed-wire fence."The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, William D. Haywood, 1929, page 81. Some of the miners, never having been charged with any crime, were eventually allowed to go free, while others were prosecuted. Hundreds more remained in the makeshift prison without charges.J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble, 1997, pages 149–150.
The Coeur d'Alene mine owners developed a permit-based hiring system to exclude union miners.J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble, 1997, pages 146–148.
Growing radicalism At their 1901 convention the WFM miners agreed to the proclamation that a "complete revolution of social and economic conditions" was "the only salvation of the working classes."All That Glitters—Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek, Elizabeth Jameson, 1998, page 179. WFM leaders openly called for the abolition of the wage system. By the spring of 1903 the WFM was the most militant labor organization in the country.Colorado's War on Militant Unionism, James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners, George G. Suggs, Jr., 1972, page 15.
Colorado strikes of 1903–04
The plan to organize the mill workers led to even fiercer battles with the refinery companies, who paid their workers half what miners earned for a ten- to twelve-hour day. When smelter workers went on strike in Colorado City, Colorado in 1903 it appeared that they might be able to win their demands without a serious fight, since the Cripple Creek miners were striking in sympathy with their demands. However, when one of the smelter operators refused to accept the deal brokered by the Governor of Colorado, James Hamilton Peabody, the Governor called in federal troops.
Peabody was a fierce opponent of unions and of any social legislation that limited businesses' right to run their own affairs as they saw fit. The crucial issue in Colorado was the eight-hour day. When the legislature had enacted a statute limiting the workday in hazardous industries, such as mining and smelting, to eight hours, the Colorado Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. The voters of Colorado then passed a referendum authorizing the eight-hour day, but the smelter owners and Republican Party fought any efforts to pass a new statute implementing the amendment.