HIT: AZ only (Copper Mine strike)

[Paula Zsiray <ZSIRAYP@mcadm.mchs.cache.k12.ut.us>]

Here is the information on the copper mine strike in Arizona - thanks
Barbara for the information - it was just what we needed.
Paula Zsiray

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
From:          BSAllen <BSAllen@aol.com>
Date:          Tue, 10 Mar 1998 23:08:27 EST
To:            zsirayp@mcadm.mchs.cache.k12.ut.us
Subject:       Re: AZ only

I think this is probably the incident referred to:

http://www.nitehawk.com/alleycat/labor.html

12 July 1917
Several thousand armed vigilantes rounded up 1,200 members of the Industrial
Workers of the World in Bisbee, Arizona and herded them into boxcars to be
shipped off and dumped in the New Mexico desert. The IWW had called a strike
against the Bisbee copper mines two weeks earlier; patriotism and support for
the war effort were cited as reasons for the action.

http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lesueur.htm
During WWI this region was the scene of vicious Union-busting activity. The
IWW was there, and Mother Jones visited regularly. Circa 1917 the Cochise
County Sheriff's Dept., local police, plus Pinkerton and FBI called in to
protect the "war-related interests" of the mine owners, rounded up over 500
mine- workers in a predawn raid on their homes. They were marched at gunpoint
to the baseball field in Warren and from there loaded onto boxcars: hundreds
of men     packed like sardines into closed cars with at best one big jar of
water, some with no water at all.
    This "deportation train" was sent on a one-way trip eastward into the New
Mexico deserts, with orders to leave them abandoned there, unopened,
regardless of the death toll. Luckily, the Mayor of Columbus, NM ordered the
boxcars unlocked and the men freed. No one died, no one was compensated, and
the perpetrators were never brought to court. Warren was a town composed
predominantly of people who had been denying, for 68 years, that this infamous
"Deportation of Miners" ever happened. Or, if it had, the hundreds of men in
the boxcars deserved it. or, if they were too young to have been there, they
knew it had never happened because official Warren history told them so (by
omitting the notorious event entirely from the local universe of discourse).

http://iww.org/~iw/feb/deport.html
(This is the IWW online newspaper with an short notice and ordering
information for a longer article.)

I could find this on the web because I remembered my parents talking about it
and knew that it had happened in Bisbee or Douglas.  On the other hand, I was
born and raised in Southern Arizona and we sure never heard about this in our
history classes, including the required Arizona history courses.

Barbara Allen
Program Analyst / Library Services
Tucson Unified School District
Tucson, AZ

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