The Bisbee Deportation

The 1917 Bisbee Deportation has elements of a labor strike, a wartime hysteria, a vigilante mob, and a mass propaganda effort, all rolled into one. It took place in Bisbee, Arizona, southeast of Tucson and close to the U.S. border with Mexico.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
are going to talk about the Bisbee deportation. This is

(00:21):
the nineteen seventeen incident that has elements of a labor
strike and a wartime hysteria, and a vigilante mob and
a mass propaganda effort, and that's all rolled into one.
It took place in Bisbee, Arizona, which is southeast of
Tucson and close to the United States border with Mexico,
and it was part of a series of labor disputes

(00:43):
in Arizona's mining industry during World War One that led
to a loss of about a hundred million pounds of copper.
It was also part of an ongoing series of deportations
and arrests and even murders that targeted members of the
International Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies.
There was a lot going on here. As I got

(01:04):
into this this podcast outline, I began wishing that we
had already done episodes on a number of people and
organizations and events in it, because that would have been helpful,
but sadly we do not already have episodes on the
Wobblies and the entire mining industry of Arizona, et cetera. Well,

(01:27):
this is the start, and then you never know where
we'll go from here. The city of Bisbee dates back
to the Apache Wars, which were an ongoing series of
armed conflicts between the United States and various Apache tribes
and nations in the American Southwest. In eighteen seventy seven,
the U. S. Army was searching the mountains of Arizona
Territory for hostile groups of Apache. A civilian tracker who

(01:51):
was working with them spotted signs of minerals, which led
to the area's first mining claim. Bisbee grew rapidly from
there thanks to the presence of lead, silver, gold, and
especially copper. By the turn of the twentieth century, more
than twenty thousand people lived in Bisbee and the communities
immediately adjacent to it. Three companies had mines in the

(02:14):
immediate area, and together these mines employed about five thousand people.
By far, the largest of these companies was Phelps Dodge,
which produced sixty of the region's copper and owned the
area's most productive mine, which was the Copper Queen Shattick
Dean Mining Company, and the Calumet and Arizona Mine ran
much smaller mining operations in the area as well. Phelps

(02:38):
Dodge also owned a lot of the town, including the hospital,
the newspaper, the only department store, and the library. The
town's y m c A and y w c A
had been established at the behest of James Douglas, who
was president of the Copper Queen Mine. There were also
businesses that weren't owned by or affiliated with Phelps Dodge,

(02:59):
but they all knew that they had to stay on
the company's good side to remain afloat. So this starts
to sound like a really stereotypical company town, and a
lot of ways it was, but it wasn't quite as
exploitive as most of the company towns that have come
up on the show before. The mining companies did plan
out the neighborhoods, and they segregated the workforce by race

(03:20):
and ethnicity in those neighborhoods, but a lot of people
living there actually owned their homes. Phelps Dodge ran a
company store, but overall its prices were comparable with other
normal stores. It wasn't a case of the company paying
miners in script that could only be used at the
company store and then inflating the prices there so much
that the workers were always in debt to the company.

(03:43):
So none of this, though, was because Phelps Dodge or
the rest of the mining companies were particularly benevolent. It
was because they wanted to attract men with families to
work in the mines with the hope of reducing turnover
and the in their labor force. The idea was that
if men brought their families to this nice place to
live that had lots of amenities, then they wouldn't have

(04:04):
to keep retraining and finding new workers. I mean, it's
all a business decision. So overall, Bisbee had a reputation
as a pretty good place to live and work, especially
for white miners. It had long had a reputation as
a quote white man's camp. At first, that had meant
that Chinese workers were excluded, but it gradually shifted to

(04:24):
mean that the white miners got the most desirable and
highest paying jobs. The pay overall was towards the top
end of the range for the industry, and all those
amenities that Phelps Dodge was paying for didn't always exist
at other mining towns and camps, but at the same time,
the situation was tense and Bisbee in nineteen seventeen. Bisbee

(04:45):
was very close to the border with Mexico, where the
Mexican Revolution had started in nineteen ten and was still ongoing.
In addition to the war going on just across the border,
Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa had attacked Columbus, New Mexico, which
was roughly two hundred miles or three d twenty one
kilometers away, on March ninth of nineteen sixteen. Nineteen people

(05:07):
had been killed and much of Columbus burned to the ground,
and other communities near the border were afraid that something
similar might happen to them. World War One added another
layer to this fear. In January of nineteen seventeen, British
cryptographers deciphered a telegram from German foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman
which promised that Germany would return Arizona, New Mexico, and

(05:31):
Texas to Mexico if Mexico joined the war on the
side of Germany. These states had all previously been a
part of Mexico, and Texas had declared its independence from
Mexico in eighteen thirty six, and the territory that would
become Arizona and New Mexico, along with most of the
rest of the American West and Southwest, was ceded to

(05:52):
the United States in eighteen forty eight, at the end
of the Mexican American War. Britain presented this telegram, known
as the Zimmerman Telegram, to the United States on February,
and by March it had been printed in newspapers. Wasn't
very long after that that the United States actually entered
the war. So now, on top of being worried that

(06:12):
the Mexican Revolution might spill over into the United States,
people living near the border were worried that Mexico would
wind up and would wind up as allies of Germany
and attack the United States directly. And yet another source
of tension in Bisbee in nineteen seventeen was a general
nationwide trend towards xenophobia and nativism. On February five, Congress

(06:35):
passed the Immigration Act of nineteen seventeen, overriding a veto
by President Woodrow Wilson. We haven't talked about this particular
piece of legislation on the show before because most of
the time it was superseded by other laws that were
more relevant to the subject at hand, But at the
time it was the strictest immigration law the country had seen.

(06:55):
Before the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighty two, the United
States had no federal laws restricting immigration. If you could
get here, you could stay. The Immigration Act of nineteen
seventeen built on the Chinese Exclusion Act, along with other
immigration laws and practices that had been put in place
in the intervening years. Section three of the nineteen seventeen

(07:16):
legislation included a colossally long list of people who were
excluded from admission into the United States, including, as a
few excerpts, quote idiots, imbeciles, and feeble minded persons, persons
of constitutional psychopathic inferiority, poppers, professional beggars and vagrants, anarchists,

(07:39):
contract laborers, and people whose passage was paid for by
someone else. The act also established what was known as
the Asiatic Exclusion Zone, which barred immigrants from most Eastern
Asia and Pacific islands. It mandated a literacy test as well,
along with attacks of eight dollars per person for adult immigrants,
which is equivalent to roughly a hundred and sixty dollars today.

(08:03):
This legislation was heavily influenced by the eugenics movement and
the idea that the United States should only allow people
with so called good stock into the country. This was
happening at the same time that Henry H. Goddard was
studying the people who arrived at Ellis Island hoping to
immigrate to the United States. We talked about that work
in our episode called the Calicas and the Eugenicists. He

(08:27):
published work from this research that claimed that forty percent
of immigrants were so called feeble minded, including eighty three
percent of Jews, seventy of Italians, eighty percent of Hungarians,
and eighty seven percent of Russians. This nineteen seventeen legislation
gives you a pretty good idea of how the country
was feeling about immigration, but it wasn't really all that

(08:48):
successful at reducing the number of quote undesirable immigrants or
immigrants from undesirable countries. In four it would be replaced
by another law known as the Johnson Reed, which was
also inspired by the eugenics movement, with a goal of
limiting immigration from southern and Eastern Europe and workers from
those countries were a significant part of the labor pool

(09:11):
in Bisbee. All of this, the minds, the war, and
the rising tide of anti immigrant sentiment fed into the
Bisbee deportation. And we have not even gotten to the
presence of the Wobblies yet, who were described as anything
from a menace to quote, the waste material of creation
which should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion.

(09:34):
We will talk about the Wobblies and who they were
and why everyone hated them so much after a sponsor break.
By nine, there were two major unions representing miners in Bisbee, Arizona,
and those two organizations were really tangled up in one
another's histories. One was the International Union of Mine Mill

(09:58):
and Smelter Worker also known as mine Mill, which had
previously been known as the Western Federation of Miners or WFM.
The WFM had been established in eighteen ninety three and
had become known for radical and sometimes violent tactics and
also for violent retaliation against the union's activities. The other

(10:20):
was the Industrial Workers of the World or i w W,
also known as the Wobbli's. The i w W was
founded in nineteen o five, and one of its founders
was William Haywood, known as Big Bill, formerly of the WFM.
Many of the w FM's most radical members moved over
to the i w W, and by nineteen o seven,

(10:41):
the Western Federation of Miners had denounced the International Workers
of the World, Concerned that the IWW's focus on revolution
was overshadowing its focus on labor organization. The Western Federation
of Miners nineteen sixteen name changed to the International Union
of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, was in part to
try to reverse a downward trend in its membership numbers

(11:03):
and to further distance itself from the IWW. Meanwhile, the
IWW had become one of the most notorious and least
trusted unions in the country. Many of its leaders and
most prominent members were socialists, and a lot of the
union's rhetoric was explicitly anti capitalist. The organization was also
pacifist and against military conscription. Conscription, and it was the

(11:26):
only major union in the United States to oppose the
nation's involvement in World War One. It was extremely easy
for the wobbli's opponents to characterize this socialist passivism, especially
in wartime as anti American and pro German, often quoting
from the organization's own publications to do it. I ww

(11:47):
activities had been met with mass arrests, deportations, and violence
throughout its history, much of it covered in the media
in a heavily sensationalized way. Wobblies were decried as agitators
who descended on working communities to spread chaos and unrest.
In some places, law enforcement ordered that i w W
members be arrested on site and charged with vagrancy. It

(12:11):
did not help that Big Bill Haywood had been arrested
for murder in nineteen o six and was acquitted a
year later. The Mine Mill Union's work in Arizona went
back decades long before that name change, including an attempts
to unionize the mines in nineteen o six and nineteen
o seven. That effort involved the work of Mary Harris Jones,

(12:32):
also known as Mother Jones, and it led to the
mass firing of about a thousand workers. Like in pretty
much every industry, the whole history of unionizing was very
long and complicated and full of a lot of violence
and firings. The i w W, on the other hand,
was newly arrived in the area, having established the Metal
Mine Workers Industrial Union Number eight hundred in nineteen seventeen,

(12:56):
one of many local chapters that it launched in the
Southwest during this time. As it established all these local unions,
the IWW recruited members from the minds of Mexican American workers,
along with immigrants from Mexico and southern Europe, all of
whom weren't particularly welcomed in other unions. These workers tended
to be the lowest paid of everyone in the minds,

(13:17):
and in Bisbee, Mexicans weren't even allowed to enter the
mine itself and work underground. In June of nineteen seventeen,
the IWW went to mine management in Bisbee with a
list of demands, most of them related to safety and
working conditions. These included only allowing blasting inside the minds

(13:38):
outside of regular working hours and assigning two men to
work on each machine. They also demanded an end to
discrimination against union workers and immigrants, and the adoption of
a flat wage system. The mine workers at the time
were being paid based on the price of copper, which
meant that their pay rates rose and fell over time,

(13:58):
and the price of copper had skyrocketed thanks to the war,
going from thirteen cents to thirty seven cents a pound,
But the workers who had gotten a raise in their
pay thanks to that had not really felt an corresponding
increase in their standard of living, because the same factors
that were causing the price of copper to go up
also caused a whole lot of inflation in the area

(14:21):
where the mines were, so in a lot of cases,
everything was so much more expensive that they felt like
they were taking home less money. In some industries, management
had made concessions to unions and workers to keep production
going during the war, but management in the Bisbee minds
denied all of the i w WS demands, also citing
the war as a reason for turning them down. So

(14:43):
this flat out denial became its own grievance because the
mine workers as a group felt like they didn't have
a way of making their voices heard or influencing their
own working conditions. The President's Mediation Commission that was convened
after this whole incident actually pinpointed us as the root
of the whole thing, and their report, they said, quote

(15:03):
the crux of the conflict was the insistence of the
men that the right and the power to obtain just
treatment were in themselves basic conditions of employment, and that
they should not be compelled to depend for such just
treatment on the benevolence or uncontrolled will of the employers.
On June, the i w W called for a strike,

(15:26):
although this wasn't actually put to a vote by any
of the union's membership. Even so, thousands of workers stayed
off the job the next day, either refusing to report
to their own jobs or refusing to work as strike breakers. Meanwhile,
the secretary of the mind Mill union encouraged strike breaking,
saying that anyone who crossed the picket line wasn't a

(15:46):
scab because it wasn't really a legal strike. Sheriff Harry
Wheeler also asked for help from federal and state authorities,
but was denied because it seemed like a simple labor
dispute that was proceeding peacefully. As a strike progressed over
the next couple of weeks, two organizations sprung up in
town to oppose it. One was the Workman's Loyalty League,

(16:08):
which was made up of mine workers who were opposed
to the strike. The other was the Citizens Protective League
or CPL. The CPL was made up of prominent citizens,
powerful business people, and some of the upper management at
the mines. It had originally been established in the face
of a previous labor dispute, and it reconvened during the
nineteen seventeen strike. Soon rumors and allegations were spreading through

(16:32):
Bisbee in the surrounding area about the Wobblies and the strike.
Some of these were picked up and disseminated through the newspaper, which,
as we said before the break was owned by the
mine people. Alleged that German infiltrators had made their way
into the i w W and the strike was intended
to weaken the United States during the war or possibly
sabotage the entire copper industry. They also reported that the

(16:56):
i w W was planning to disrupt the city's independence
stay Fast activities, with the Loyalty League marching in a
parade on the fourth to prove them wrong. Sheriff Wheeler
started deputizing citizens of Bisbee during all of this, and
eventually more than a thousand people had been made temporary deputies,
most of them were members of the CPL. Even with

(17:18):
these a thousand additional untrained law enforcement people on the scene.
Everything was still proceeding peacefully, though there were heated arguments,
but there was no actual violence. On July eleven, Wheeler
released a statement calling for the deportation of everyone involved
in the strike, accusing them of treason and vagrancy, and

(17:39):
encouraging women and children to stay indoors. A very similar
deportation had happened in Jerome, Arizona, just a day earlier,
but on a much smaller scale. After the iww called
for a strike in Jerome's Minds, workers stayed off the job.
The sheriff had four i w W leaders arrested and
issued an order for all wabble eased to leave town

(18:00):
within twelve hours. At two am on July twelfth, calls
started going out to the deputized members of the Citizens
Protective League, and this included calls to people living in Douglas,
which was another border town about thirty miles or forty
eight kilometers away. By five am, they had gathered about
two thousand deputies, all of them wearing white arm bands

(18:22):
to distinguish themselves from the Wobblies and the striking workers.
Law enforcement didn't contact the governor, the federal government the
military or anyone else to ask for aid or explain
what was going on. This vigilante mob seized the telegraph
station to try to censor any outgoing communications about what
was happening, and they started moving through Bisbee, nearby Lowell

(18:45):
and the surrounding area, interrogating people at gunpoint about whether
they were working, and rounding up anyone believed to be
a member of the i w W, a striking worker,
or someone who supported the strike. This included Archie Cook,
arrested by his own brother, Edward Leslie Cook, who had
been told that if he didn't go along with the

(19:06):
mob he would be deported himself. One minor and one
deputy were killed during this massive round up. Jim Brew,
who was a boilerman's helper and an IWW organizer, killed
Orson McRae, who was a shift boss at the Calumet
and Arizona mine and also a former candidate for counsel
and a member of the Loyalty League. Brew had called

(19:28):
out a warning that he would shoot anybody who tried
to take him, and when several men continued to move
towards his boarding house, he fired through the screen door.
Multiple men in the mob returned fire, and the coroner's
inquest that followed all of this didn't determine which of
them killed brew. The deputized mob forced about two thousand
men to march to Warren Ballpark, where they were held

(19:50):
in the stands until the arrival of a train provided
by El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, which was a subsidiary
of Phelps Dodge. Once the train arrived, the men being
held were ordered to renounce the strike and return to work,
or to board the train's cattle cars. In the words
of deported worker Fred Watson, who had worked in the
Copper Queen mine, quote, you either put a white rag

(20:13):
around your arm, or you left town. A few hundred men,
most of them not actually employed in the minds, agreed
to these terms, and they left. The rest were forced
into twenty three manure cape cattle cars in ninety degree
heat on his thirty five degrees celsius. And then they
were hauled out of town. And we're going to talk

(20:33):
about where they went, but first we will pause and
have a little sponsor break. After leaving Busby, Arizona, to
the train carrying about twelve hundred men under armed guard,
traveled sixteen hours east to Columbus, New Mexico, home of
Camp for long The hope was to leave the deported

(20:56):
men there, that the people who would arrange whole deportation
had not really thought it through. Camp Furlong did not
have enough food or the necessary hygiene facilities to just
absorb so many people, so the train turned back west
and stopped in Airmana's, New Mexico, where the men spent
the night in the cattle cars. They had very little
in the way of food, water, and protection from the

(21:18):
elements until troops arrived on July fourteen and escorted them
back to Columbus. This time, the army provided them with
rations and water and tasked some of them with digging latrines,
also telling them they were all free to go. They
set up what was essentially a refugee camp, where many
of them stayed for months. Back in Bisbee, the town

(21:40):
placed armed guards on all the roads to keep the
deported workers from coming back. Said He also established a
kangaroo court, which continued to try and deport hundreds of
people for vagrancy and other charges, most of which were
pretty flimsy at best. Over the next couple of months,
they threatened the people that continued to be supported with

(22:01):
lynching if they returned. Some of the men in the
refugee camp got legal advice from Attorney W. B. Cleary,
who wrote a statement saying that they would return to
work if President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the minds and provided
a military escort back to Bisbee for them. But other
than that, they were essentially stuck. Although they were free

(22:21):
to go, where most of them wanted to go was home,
back to Bisbee, where many of them had families and children,
but Bisbee would not take them. About two hundred men
did leave the camp on August five, and most of
them made their way to other cities and towns, and
afterward the army conducted a census of everyone who was left.
They found that there was no truth at all to

(22:43):
the idea that the Wobblies had been infiltrated by huge
numbers of Germans. Of the nearly nine hundred men left
in camp, only about twenty were German. Most of the
deported men were immigrants, but a hundred and sixty seven
described themselves as Americans. There were also two hundred nine Mexicans,
a hundred and seventy nine immigrants from various parts of

(23:05):
the Balkans, sixty seven Irish and thirty two British, along
with smaller numbers of people from a very long list
of other countries. Almost eight hundred of the men in
the camp said that they owned property. At first, public
opinion was in favor of all of this, particularly in
mining communities. A publication from the Arizona Chapter of the

(23:27):
American Mining Congress, published not long after, describes it as
an accomplishment, praising the sheriff and citizens of the county
for quote removing one thousand, one nine two enemies of
the government disloyal citizens from the state, a proceeding probably
without precedent in the history of the country in point
of the number of men handled and the celerity and

(23:47):
thoroughness with which the work was accomplished. But at the
same time, various people in organizations were trying to negotiate
with the minds in the city of Bisbee. One of
these was former Arizona Governor George W. He Hunt, who
had been a big supporter of organized labor throughout his
time in office. A disputed nineteen sixteen election had gone

(24:08):
to his opponent, Thomas E. Campbell, by order of the
Arizona Supreme Court. Another court decision would eventually put Hunt
back in office, but in the meantime, he was acting
as a mediator in the Busbee dispute, along with other
labor disputes that were going on in Arizona. This was
part of a whole lot of strikes and disputes, especially

(24:28):
in the mining industry. He was doing this at the
request of President Wilson. The Arizona Federation of Labor also
contacted President Wilson in August to ask for help for
the deported miners, but Wilson was reluctant to take action.
He'd been close friends with Cleveland Dodge of Phelps Dodge
Mining Company for years. When the Arizona Federation of Labor

(24:49):
made its request, Wilson replied that he was quote loath
to believe that genuine representatives of the Federation of Labor
would send me a message containing so unjust and offensive
and intimation. I'm just gonna say it was not unjust
and offensive, it was correct. Hunt later sent Wilson a
full report of what had happened, and he sent a

(25:10):
copy to the Department of Labor as well, and in
this report he pointed out that a lot of the
people involved were still stuck in Columbus because all they
wanted was just to go home and have their basic
rights restored. After receiving Hunt's report, Wilson established a Mediation
Commission to investigate what had happened and advise on a resolution.

(25:31):
Felix Frankfurter, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, was one of
its members. As the commission was conducting its investigation, the
governor instructed the Citizens Protective League to disband their kangaroo
court and put the city back into normal operations. The
Mediation Commission released its report in October, and the report
found that the Bisbee deportation had been illegal and that

(25:54):
no one could substantiate their claims that the Wobblings and
the Minds had been infiltrated by German. They also noted
that nobody who made that claim could even really say
where they had come by that information in the first place. Instead,
the commission found that the deportations were motivated by fear,
not by actual danger. To quote from the report, the

(26:16):
plan for the deportation and its execution are attributable to
the belief in the minds of those who engineered it
that violence was contemplated by the strikers and sympathizers with
the strikers who had come into the district from without,
that life and property would be insecure unless such deportation
was undertaken, and that the state was without the necessary
armed force to prevent such anticipated violence and to safeguard

(26:39):
life and property within the district. This belief has no
justification in the evidence in support of it presented by
the parties who harbored it. The report also strongly criticized
the use of repressive tactics to deal with such labor unrest,
calling it quote the source of much bitterness, turns radical
labor leaders into martyrs, thus increasing their following, and worst

(27:03):
of all, in the minds of the workers, tends to
implicate the government as a partisan in the in the
economic conflict. Later on, the document continued, quote too often,
there is a glaring inconsistency between our democratic purposes in
this war abroad and the autocratic conduct of some of
those guiding the industry at home. This inconsistency is emphasized

(27:28):
by episodes such as the Bisbee deportations. In the aftermath
of the deportation, the Department of Justice ordered the arrests
of twenty one Phelps, Dodge executives, and several local leaders
of BISBEE, but it was eventually determined that no federal
law had been broken, so there was nothing to charge
them with in federal court. The first federal interstate kidnapping

(27:50):
law was the Lindberg Law, which was not passed until
nine two after the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's son.
If there had been a federal kidnapping job before these deportations,
it clearly would have applied, because the men were literally
forced into a train and then taken across state lines.

(28:10):
Even though no federal charges could be filed, the Department
of Justice recommended that Arizona prosecute any violations of state law.
Several of the men had also been drafted while they
were stuck in that refugee camp, which meant that the
deportation had run a foul of the selective draft law,
so the Department of Justice advised Arizona to pass that

(28:30):
part along to the Secretary of State. The Department of
Justice also advised that the aspects of the deportation that
interfered with interstate communication, like taking over the telegraph office
be directed to the Interstate Commerce Commission. In nineteen nineteen
and nineteen twenty, thousands of documents were filed in Coaches

(28:51):
County Superior Court in the case of State of Arizona
versus Phelps Dodge Corporation, which also named two hundred twenty
four individual men is defend indence, but only one of
these ever came to trial. H. E. Wootton, who owned
a hardware store. It's not really clear why out of
everyone Wouton was the only person who was tried, but

(29:12):
he was ultimately acquitted. His defense was that he was
following the quote law of necessity, and here is how
the jury foreman described it afterward. Quote the verdict of
the jury is a vindication of the deportation, if not
in the legal sense, at least in the moral sense.
No man could listen to the evidence adduced during the
trial without feeling that the people of Bisbee were in

(29:33):
eminent danger, and that if their fears were ungrounded, yet
they were apparently real and pressing. The essence of the
law of necessity, has explained and laid down to the
jury by Judge Patty, is that it protects a man
and his invasion of the rights of others when his
fear for his own safety or welfare is great enough

(29:54):
to force him to a drastic step. That this fear
does not have to be a fear of really, really
existent dangers, but only of apparent danger, when the appearance
of that danger is so compelling as to be real
to him that views it. But I feel like this
is still a defense. We see, and you saw the

(30:14):
time I was scared, and even though that fear was
not bounded in anything, I have the defense that I
was scared. As for the miners and their supporters, A
Stewart Embry was tried in Tucson and found not guilty
of incitement to riot, but the Wobblies as a group
became a target on a more national scale. On September five,

(30:38):
nine seventeen, the FBI rated every i w W office
in the nation. Over the span of about twenty four hours,
hundreds of i w W leaders were tried on charges
of espionage. Every defendant was found guilty after less than
an hour of deliberation. The District Attorney of Philadelphia called
these raids and the trial that followed as undertake and

(31:00):
quote very largely to put the i w w out
of business. Some joined the military or found work in
Minds and other cities, but many of them found themselves
cut off from their homes and their property, and Busbee
with really nowhere else to go. The labor dispute and
the Commission's report did lead to a few changes in
Bisbees minds. The three Minds superintendents all set up official

(31:23):
grievance procedures and got rid of the physical exam requirement.
Wages in Busbees minds also rose by about fifty in
nineteen This turned out to be temporary, though the mining
industry and Busbee started to suffer with a shift towards
pit mining. Historians who look back on this are mostly
agreed on the fact that the root of the workers

(31:44):
dissatisfaction really came from not being able to have their
grievances heard and addressed in a meaningful way. And then
there's also a lot of consensus about the idea that
the deportation was rooted in fear and not actual danger.
But there is still debate about which year had the
greatest part of it, whether it was the fear and
dislike of immigrants, and this general national climate of xenophobia

(32:08):
and nativism or whether it was fear and dislike of
unions and organized labor, especially the Wobblies. I cannot emphasize
the Wobblies were so distrusted and disliked that it is
hard even today to figure out which charges against them
were real and which are completely made up. Uh. Like

(32:32):
the this massive trial that took place that we referenced
earlier included um just like it's it's often described as
a show trial and not like an actual methodical investigation,
and a lot of the people that were sentenced and
went to prison, where people who hadn't been involved in
the organization in years. The whole huge thing that involves

(32:53):
Kinnessaw mountain landis who was a person that has been
on my short list for an episode for a really
long time. So maybe at some point we will get
to this Wibbly trial. It reminds me of the Palmer
Raids in a lot of ways, like this whole incident
and that whole trial. Like I think there are people
that feel like it's sort of a set set of
precedent for the Palmer Raids. Anyway, a whole big, complicated thing.

(33:17):
I thought this was going to be a real, relatively
straightforward story when I got into it, because it seems
like on the surface surface, such a okay, there was
a labor dispute and then they put everybody on a
train and deported them. But then the whole huge history,
like the entangled history of the labor organizations in the
minds and everything that was happening in World War One

(33:38):
makes it way more complicated than I expected when I
got into this. Do you also have listener mail that
may or may not be complicated? It's a rather, it's
a longer mail. Si'm only going to read part of it.
It is from Christina and she says, Hi, they're ladies.
I feel like I'm talking to old friends. As of
this week, I finally caught up with every episode of

(33:58):
the podcast, and I'm a loss at what to listen
to when I'm cleaning, driving, etcetera. And then she ticks
through several things and the ones that I am going
to read are my sister, the history major and I
have been in a race to see who finished listening
to every episode first, and I'm proud to say I win.
Have been able to wow her. When she was telling

(34:20):
friends about a book she was reading about the Halifax explosion,
and I added a comment about how the sailors on
the boat survived. She was shocked and asked, how do
you know that? Of course I told her stuffy miss
in history class. Apparently she missed that episode. On a
side note, did you know that? Did did you know
that due to the Halifax explosion, that bay is the

(34:40):
most heavily scanned down to the square meter and the
explosion experts still use it as a reference for training. Uh.
And then the next part that I was going to read.
At Easter dinner, I was listening to my parents and
friends talk about their lives and my my my mom
said how she had met Martin Luther King. Seeing is
how I had just listened to your episode on the

(35:01):
Memphis Sanitation Workers, I asked her to tell us more.
She met him in February when he came to speak
at her college. My mom was a poly sign ajor
and was the secretary of the club that helped sponsor
his visit. She was able to meet and talk to him,
and she always said he was sick and worn down
at the time. One quote that she remembered from the
speech he gave was quote, how can you pull yourself

(35:24):
up from your bootstraps if you have no boots. I
asked about the audience and my mom said it was
actually quite diverse. The only students that were censored from
attending were the white guys with long hair. They had
to get special permission to be on campus. They're part
of a rock band and wanted to hear MLK speak,
and their hair was against the dress code. My mom

(35:44):
also went on to tell me to tell me how
many of her friends black and white, took part of
the riots and Newark and others, and we're also part
of the freedom rides. With all that being said, I
must thank you for being fair and honest with your
point of view on history. You give us the good,
the bad, and the ugly, and I love it. Thank
you for your time, Christina. Thank you so much for
this note. Christina. One of my favorite things is when
people tell us about sharing the podcast with their families

(36:07):
or talking to their families about things that have come
up in the podcast, or in this case, challenging your
sister to listening to our podcast. Um, those are some
of my favorite stories, like the family, the family connections
that come together through the show, and the things that
we talked about on the show. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast
where History podcast at how stuffworks dot com. And then

(36:29):
we're also at missed in History all over social media.
That's our Facebook and our Twitter, and our Pinterest in
our Instagram. You can come to our website which is
missed in History dot com and you will find show
notes for all the episodes Holly and I have worked
on together. You will find a whole bunch of sources
for this episode, So if you're wondering about any of
the particular things that we made a brief reference to,

(36:50):
you will find lots of other information on that. There.
You will also find a searchable archive of any episode ever.
And you can also find and subscribe to our podcast
that Apple Podcasts, Google Play and wherever else do you
get podcasts for more on this and thousands of other topics.

(37:11):
Because it how stuff Works dot com. M