Little History

Poem and broadside by Carlos Cortez

We had a really good experience working today at the Butte Silver Bow Archives. The directors were very helpful and interested in my project. They have a display devoted to Frank, and a great collection from an overlooked wobbly named Emily Kaiyala, the daughter of Finnish miners in Butte, who was an active IWW until her death in 1981.

Frank Little is NOT an easy man to research. What articles, letters or journals he kept were confiscated during the Palmer raids and destroyed immediately after the IWW trial in 1918. The suitcase that was found in his room after his murder disappeared- though the Butte Daily Post printed a list of items within it, including a letter from Frank's alcoholic brother Fred that their mother had died in June.

The most difficult part is trying to figure out what the hell was going on in Frank's head in the last weeks of his life. He had the reputation of being lovably crass, but in the months before coming to Butte, Frank's outspoken views on the war and his belief that they were all "going to end up in front of the firing squad" really frightened his colleagues, like Ralph Chaplin and Bill Haywood. After what happened to Joe Hill, this was not an irrational idea. I found a letter from Frank to Haywood a while ago asking why Solidarity hadn't published his article on the war- an angry letter reiterating that this was their last chance to take a stand against this "capitalistic slaughterfest" and if they lined some of the fellow workers up against a wall to be shot, that was to be expected- and he was willing to be the first in line. And yet he emphasized that the union must put it's full support behind those men who "refused to kill or be killed".

Frank always practiced and advocated non-violent civil disobedience, and continued to do so even in the dangerous atmosphere of the Butte strike. Which brings me to the issue of Frank's bold, controversial speeches he made in the last days of his life, which unfortunately have only been preserved in company owned newspapers. It's been like trying to get "fair and balanced" reporting from Fox News. I have found many excerpts from his speeches in these papers, and I have to say some of it does sound like Frank, though taken out of context and truncated to make it sound more seditious and violent.

I do believe Frank was having a personal conflict between violent and non-violent action. He was a man who had suffered from more beatings, jailings and physical violence than any human rights activist I know in history- and on July 1917 he had the broken bones and ruptures to prove it. He was in pain, and all the evidence he saw proved that men that have guns and are willing to hurt people will always do so. He had witnessed the Bisbee deportation, where 1,200 union men were arrested and deported by armed thugs in filthy cattle cars to a makeshift prison in the middle of the New Mexico desert-guarded by Federal Troops.

I believe Frank suffered form rage and guilt over what happened in Bisbee- he had advised strongly against having that strike that summer, and was forced to support it when the workers- influenced by spies, has voted to do so. I think Frank had tremendous guilt for failing to stop, and then win the Bisbee strike, much less protect the workers from vigilantes. Having escaped this deportation himself (being laid up with a broken leg) compounded this guilt.

When Frank dragged his broken body up to Butte MT, he was trying to make up for what happened in Bisbee, to avenge the workers and redeem himself- and I know he was expecting the worst in terms of company violence.

I don't believe Frank was advocating direct violence against the company or the government- but an aggressive self defense in the face of armed private gunmen, Pinkerton Detectives, spies and Federal Troops who always seemed to be on the side of the bosses. When he made statements that conducting a "peaceful strike" was like conducting a "peaceful war"- it was from the expectation of deadly violence that would, and was perpetrated by Anaconda.

So I am torn as how to portray Frank's final speech when I write the book. The words taken directly from the newspapers sound extreme outside of the context of who he was and what he did. I know absolutely that Frank was more willing to be killed, than to kill in the cause of the working class- I wish this had not been proven so brutally.