From the onset of 1913 Copper Country mine strike, the Daily Mining Gazette had made no attempt to hide its pro-mining company stance. So, when on April 10, 1914, the editor reprinted an article that first appeared in the New York Times, in which Samuel Gompers defended the Western Federation of Miners, the editors printed it as sarcasm.  

When published in the New York Times, the headline of the article read: “Gompers Defends Western Miners; Says Federation is Conservative and Has Not Been Treated Fairly.” The article that appeared in the Gazette was published under the headline: “Gompers Says the Moyer Outfit Has Undergone Change.”  

Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the article stated, had said that the WFM had not been treated fairly in the “Calumet copper strike.” 

Gompers went on to state that the WFM had conducted itself peaceably and fairly at Calumet and that in the previous few years it  had been conservative in its general character.  

Much of what Gompers said in the article was, of course, pro-union propaganda. But he did say one thing that rings like a bell: Gompers placed responsibility for the labor strife on “unorganized or newly organized men,” and said most of the trouble “of this kind” is caused by the mental attitude of employers and employees.  

With that statement, Gompers touched on something no one else did – before or since. He addressed the psychology of both employers and employees involved in the conflict.  

Gompers’ word choice, “mental attitude” raised the behaviors of the early 20th century organized labor movement in America to a whole other level. The Copper Country strike is just one example of the labor conflicts that swept the nation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  

Contemporary historical documents disprove beyond any shadow of doubt that Gompers’ claims that the WFM was peaceable and conservative. But that the strife was the responsibility of unorganized or recently organized workers is supported by historical documents, much of it generated by the union itself. What is also true is Gompers’ charge that “trouble of this kind” was caused by the mental attitude of both sides of the conflict.  

Throughout the strike, at least 35 people were shot, nine of whom died as a result of their wounds. In the Croatian neighborhood of Seeberville, two men were killed when company guards fired pistols into a boarding house. A few months later, a local union member fired into another boarding house in Painesdale, killing several people.  Six homes were intentionally burned and at least three more were dynamited. House sub-committee investigation testimonies from 1914 frequently detail such actions committed by union members. And yet, when Houghton County Sheriff, James Cruse, contracted the Waddell-Mahon agency of New York to train his own deputies and assist in guarding lives and property, union executives denounced Cruse’s actions, declaring his “gunmen” were strike breakers, and demanded state and national government investigations. In fact, the Waddell-Mahon agency was an organization of violent strike breakers. 

The members of the Executive Board of the WFM did not want the Copper Country strike in the summer of 1913, preferring instead to wait until the locals had gained more members and were better organized. They also wanted to initiate the strike in the spring of the year, when the strike would have at least five months of good weather. The Executive Board knew it would be a long strike and was keenly aware of the size and wealth of the Michigan mining companies it wanted to take on. They wanted the odds more in the union’s favor.

Surviving union documents clearly show that it was the leaders of the locals who took the lead in initiating the strike, which began on July 23, with less than three good months of weather left in the season.  

Members of the union locals began the strike with rioting, assaults, forcibly closing mining surface operations such as mine pumps, boilers, and hoists, leaving thousands of men stranded underground.  

Sheriff Cruse responded, as was typical across the nation at the time, by requesting that the governor send militia to assist him in controlling the situation. 

The WFM organized daily parades in which thousands of strikers marched through their respective communities. Many of the parades became violent, or nearly so, as strikers clashed with militiamen who were ordered to establish boundaries the strikers were not permitted to pass.  

While some of the mining companies hired their own private guards, and at least one company organized its own police force, collectively the companies’ management took no real action, preferring Sheriff Cruse and the Michigan militia do all the dirty work. In refusing to negotiate with strike representatives while also refusing to meet with state and federal mediators, the mine managers only accomplished exacerbating all three.  

Strikers eventually found that their wives leading the parades was to their benefit but were met with public disapproval when many women began assaulting non-strikers with brooms dipped in buckets of excrement from outhouses.  

The union further frustrated the situation when it made the decision to stop issuing strikers cash and switched to vouchers and opened its own commissary stores. During the early days of the strike, many business owners were very sympathetic to strikers, and they offered discounts of five to ten percent to strikers. The businessmen felt betrayed by the strikers and the union, which further deepened divisions in the community.  

In November 1913, a large group of residents, many of whom were once sympathetic to the plight of the strikers, emerged as members of the Citizen’s Alliance with the publicly stated goal of driving the WFM and its lawlessness from the district. The Alliance created deeper divisions between strikers and non-strikers. Most Alliance members were middle-class business owners and professionals who feared the union’s socialist propaganda. They had also suffered financially because of the strike, particularly as payroll revenue dwindled and the union switched to vouchers. Strikers no longer shopped the local businesses.  

There were thousands of mine workers, too, who did not want the union and what it was demanding. While they knew they earned lower wages than miners in western mining districts such as Butte or Bisbee, they were also aware that they paid a much lower cost of living, due in large part to corporate paternalism. Many felt that the paternalistic aspect of the companies for which they worked benefitted both the worker and the company. 

So, while Gompers, in the newspaper article, said many things that were essentially union-biased rhetoric, much of what he said also came to the core of the strike – including the strife being caused by the mental attitudes of employers and employees.  

Gompers was not accurate in his charge that the WFM was a peaceable and conservative union. However, the union’s president, Charles Moyer, did in fact undergo much change during the Bill Haywood trial for the murder of former Idaho governor Steunenberg, according to Eric L. Clements’ article, Pragmatic Revolutionaries?: Tactics, Ideologies, and the Western Federation of Miners in the Progressive Era, which appeared in the Western Historical Quarterly No. 40, winter 2009. 

Moyer, wrote Clements, while awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in the 1905 Steunenberg case, had driven Haywood to increased radicalism and Moyer to moderation and eventually conservatism.  

Clements stated that the degree of the union’s or its leaders’ participation in violence (in the Idaho strikes) was and is impossible to determine. So it is regarding the Copper Country strike.  

In the end, the WFM lost its strike in Michigan, as it did the Cour d’Alene, Idaho strike.  

The mining Companies, in their refusal to cooperate with anyone or anything, lost much respect on state and federal levels. The strikers, too, lost. Most of them were immigrants from Finland, Croatia, and Italy. Members of those ethnic groups received much scorn and stigma, whether they were involved in the strike or not. Nobody won the strike of 1913. But it comes back to what Gompers had said: the cause was the mental attitudes of both the employers and the employees.