The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.
Most Americans know something about the carnage of World War I โ the โwar to end all warsโ โ that ended just over a century ago. In addition to 10 million military and 7 million civilian deaths, the war swept away the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, unleashing forces that still inflame the world.
As if that wasnโt enough, an influenza pandemic that broke out shortly before the armistice in 1918 killed 50 million globally and at least a half-million Americans.
Many Arizonans also have some familiarity with the labor unrest that roiled Bisbee soon after the United States entered the war, events depicted in a recent documentary film, โBisbee โ17.โ Less clear is that the violence in Bisbee was closely linked to the larger conflict that engulfed both Europe and the United States.
On April 6, 1917, three years after the fighting began in Europe, the United States abandoned neutrality. Desperate to halt the sale of American raw materials to Britain and France under a neutral flag, Germany unleashed its U-boats in the Atlantic. After submarines sank five U.S. merchant ships, President Woodrow Wilson called for crushing German militarism and using force to โmake the world safe for democracy.โ Congress overwhelmingly voted for war.
Surprisingly, Americaโs first โbattleโ began long before the first โdoughboysโ reached the trench lines bisecting France many months later. Instead, it occurred in the booming rough and tumble mining town of Bisbee, nestled in Southern Arizonaโs Mule Mountains.
On July 12, 1917, several thousand armed special deputies seized nearly 2,000 striking miners they accused of being German agents and saboteurs. The encounter established a pattern for the suppression of labor activism and political dissent that lasted throughout the war and beyond.
Modern warfare generated huge demand for copper and other minerals. The powerful Phelps Dodge corporation (PD) controlled several Arizona mining towns. Bisbeeโs population of around 25,000 in 1917 made it one of Arizonaโs largest cities. PD was not only the chief employer, it also owned most of the cityโs housing, retail stores and the local newspaper. War orders boosted PD profits, but workersโ wages hardly budged.
The harsh realities of labor in the mining and timber industries led many workers to join a radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW. Under the militant leadership of โBig Billโ Haywood, the IWW, or โWobblies,โ considered capitalism inherently exploitive and envisioned the worldโs workers eventually controlling the means of production.
Union leaders accused corporations like PD of doubly exploiting the working class: miners were worked like slaves to produce wealth, then used as cannon fodder in war. Unlike some of its rival unions, the IWW welcomed Hispanic and Eastern European members. Ideology aside, in Bisbee the union demanded that PD boost wages, provide safer working conditions, and abolish the differential wage scale that paid immigrant Hispanic and European miners less than Anglos. When PD balked, the IWW called a strike on June 27, 1917.
Anticipating labor unrest, PD organized a โCitizens Protective Leagueโ among middle class residents and recruited a few non-IWW miners into a Workers Loyalty League. By portraying the interference with copper production as a threat to national security, the company enlisted the support of Cochise County Sheriff Harry C. Wheeler.
The sheriff set up a special post in Bisbee where he assumed the role of strike breaker. Wheeler joined PD in denouncing the strikers as โpro-German and anti-Americanโ agents who intended to โinjure the United States.โ He deputized over 2,000 โloyal citizensโ from Bisbee, Douglas and nearby towns during early July.
Around dawn on July 12, these armed vigilantes seized 2,000 men โ about half of all miners in Bisbee โ whom PD had identified as IWW supporters. They were hauled before a kangaroo court and accused of treason for undermining the war effort. About 700 men who renounced the union and pledged loyalty were released.
More than 1,200 miners, half of them Hispanic and Eastern European immigrants, were forced by machine gun-toting vigilantes onto two dozen manure encrusted railroad cattle cars and transported on a rail line owned by PD 200 miles east into the New Mexico desert.
After a grueling journey, the prisoners were off-loaded without provisions and threatened with execution if they returned to Bisbee. Ironically, although the strikers were (falsely) accused of being German agents, they were saved by humanitarian intervention by the governor of New Mexico and commanders of an Army unit stationed in Columbus near the Mexican border who disputed the legality of the mass arrests and provided temporary shelter to the deportees.
For weeks after what became known as the โBisbee Deportationโ (the strikers were forced out of Arizona, not the United States), PD officials and Sheriff Wheeler severed all telegraph, telephone and press contacts between Bisbee and the outside world.
The Citizens Protective League ruled the city, imposing rough justice on anyone deemed disloyal. Residents were compelled to carry a special โpassportโ issued by the sheriff when entering or leaving the tightly guarded city. Several hundred additional union sympathizers and their families were accused of disloyalty, run out of town and threatened with execution if they returned.
When reports of the deportation finally reached Washington, President Wilson criticized the vigilante action and ordered a federal inquiry. A special commission eventually determined that the arrests were โwholly illegal.โ However, neither PD managers nor public officials were punished. In fact, what occurred in Bisbee set a pattern for the country at large.
Just as the strike began, Congress passed the Espionage Act, supplemented in 1918 by the Sedition Act. These laws made it a crime to use โdisloyal, profane or scurrilous languageโ about the Constitution, Congress, the president, the flag, the draft or American allies. Even referring to a โcapitalist warโ became a crime.
Just as Phelps Dodge used public officials such as Sheriff Wheeler to crush the IWW in Bisbee, federal prosecutions during 1917-18 destroyed the IWW nationally. Many of its leaders were jailed or driven underground. Even inadvertent criticism of the war had consequences. Among those convicted of subversion was the hapless producer of a silent film titled โThe Spirit of โ76,โ a Revolutionary War saga that depicted British redcoats in an unflattering light.
As in Bisbee, the federal government outsourced many security functions to private but officially recognized vigilante groups such as the American Protective League (APL). Dressed in official-looking uniforms, tens of thousands of APL volunteers were tasked with rooting out subversion by opening mail, tapping telephones, monitoring union activity, interrogating German speakers and rounding up suspected draft evaders, known as โslackers.โ
Under pressure, delicatessens replaced sauerkraut with โliberty cabbageโ and symphony orchestras stopped performing Beethoven.
Shortly after the war, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his young protรฉgรฉ, J. Edgar Hoover, fretted over congressional plans to repeal the Sedition Act. Palmer cited the Bisbee deportation as a model of why the law should remain in force.
Partly to make their case, early in 1920 the Justice Department acted on rumors of a revolutionary plot as justification to conduct raids in 33 cities and arrest over 4,000 recent immigrants on charges of subversion. Despite lack of evidence, about 600 were deported to Russia and other parts of Europe before legal challenges halted the removals.
Palmerโs overreach sank his presidential hopes and doomed the law. Hoover, already a wily bureaucrat, avoided censure and soon became head of the Justice Departmentโs Bureau of Investigation, later the FBI. With the onset of the Cold War, Hoover finally got his wish. Congress enacted the McCarran Act (1950) and McCarran-Walters Act (1952) which gave the Justice Department broad authority to exclude, arrest and deport both immigrants and naturalized citizens for a wide variety of political and moral offenses.
