There was a ceremony in Calumet this past Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of the Italian Hall disaster, and all around the country there were news articles, blog posts, TV shows and radio programs about the trouble in Calumet on Christmas Eve, 1913. Our film came in for some…
“They Try to Create Despair Among the Miners”
One of the small treasures I brought back to New York from Lake Superior is Hannu Leppanen and Daniel Schneider’s 2013 letterpress edition of Tyomies, the Finnish workingman’s newspaper published during the strike of 1913. I’ve mentioned the project here before. Daniel set up his Chandler & Price Pilot Press…
“Unfinished Business”
Mike Ragogna interviews Nora Guthrie today on Huffington Post about her father and his music. MR: Were there certain topics brought up in his material, such as the plight of the Mexican worker in “Deportees,” that resonated with you more than others? NG: Woody wrote over 3000 songs for every…
Women on the Verge of a Social Breakdown
By late August of 1913, authorities in Calumet were facing a problem that was “becoming more perplexing each day.” Women were mixing it up with strikebreakers, scabs, deputies and national guardsmen. “This development is perplexing,” read an article dated August 28th, “as the men are timid in resisting such attacks.”…
Where Is Calumet?
It’s uncanny how this notice from a 1913 newspaper anticipates the opening scene of 1913 Massacre: “Where is Calumet?” That is a simple question, apparently. Almost anybody will say it is a thriving city up in the country where they blow open the earth with dynamite and wrest copper there…
STRIKE!
100 years ago today, the Finnish language newspaper Työmies or The Worker announced: This morning in Michigan’s Copper region, a miner’s strike broke out which, according to information received from various locations up to this point, has stopped work in all of the mines with few exceptions. The strike that began…