When Montana's Governor Declared Martial Law To Remove Elected Officials

CounterPunch

Weekend Edition
March 26 / 7, 2005

Operation Butte Freedom, 1914
When Governor Samuel Venus Stewart Declared Martial Law in Montana
By JACKIE CORR

On April 3, 1911, Socialist Lewis Duncan was elected mayor of Butte, Montana. With Duncan, a municipal judge and city treasurer, as well as six other party members were elected to office. Two years later the Butte Socialist Party repeated the 1911 victory. By 1914, the Amalgamated (later Anaconda) Copper Company decided Butte needed to be tamed and the right people placed in political office. The Montana newspapers then discovered the dreaded "Wobblies."

So Governor Sam Stewart sent the state militia into Butte to restore law and order and bust up the miner's union while naming the notorious warden-gangster and Sixth Floor triggerman, Frank Conley as provost marshal.

A few years later Silver Bow County Sheriff Larry Duggan recalled the events of 1914:

"In 1914, the Amalgamated called into Butte the state militia through the orders of the putty governor. Already in place was an army of Pinkertons and stool-pigeons operating to create trouble and to poison the minds of the workers against one another while arousing suspicion and distrust. Through the courts - if we may call them such - Tim Driscoll was ousted from the office from Sheriff. Lewis J. Duncan, mayor of Butte, and the only mayor who was ever elected a second time, was also ousted out of office. Conley, warden of the penitentiary, was given the position of provost marshal and threw all the city employees into the street, bag and baggage. The state militia seized the new courthouse, a building that had cost the citizens three-quarters of a million dollars to build, then turned it into a barracks and a stables for the horses loaned to the officers of the militia by Con Kelley and the Amalgamated. At that time, as at the present, thousands of the best workers and citizens were driven out of Butte by starvation and the blacklist system. Since then, through corruption and stealth, the Industrial Kaisers have stolen one election after another. Men have been killed and murdered without a single person being sent to the penitentiary. This is only one part of the over-riding of our laws by those who know no law but that of pistols, black-jacks, high-powered rifles and sawed-off shotguns as was shown a short while ago on the Anaconda Road."

The above author, Larry Duggan, Butte's famous mortician was elected sheriff of Silver Bow County twice during the 1920's. Like the earlier Socialists, he ordered the corporate gunmen "behind the fence,." meaning inside the mineyards. Duggan also gained some fame during the nationwide resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and 100 percent Americanism movement of the 1920's by issuing a statement that "should the Klan attempt any of their time-honored activities in Silver Bow County, they are to be shot down like wolves." As for Lewis Duncan, who had arrived as Butte's first Unitarian minister in 1902, we know little of his life after 1914. Duncan died in Rochester, Minnesota on January 24, 1936, at the age of 78.

http://www.counterpunch.org/corr03262005.html

This film is a MUST SEE!



An Injury To One
A Film by Travis Wilkerson
http://www.frif.com/new2003/inj.html

AN INJURY TO ONE provides a corrective - and absolutely compelling - glimpse of a particularly volatile moment in early 20th century American labor history: the rise and fall of Butte, Montana. Specifically, it chronicles the mysterious death of Wobbly organizer Frank Little, a story whose grisly details have taken on a legendary status in the state. Much of the extant evidence is inscribed upon the landscape of Butte and its surroundings. Thus, a connection is drawn between the unsolved murder of Little, and the attempted murder of the town itself.

Butte's history was entirely shaped by its exploitation by the Anaconda Mining Company, which, at the height of WWI, produced ten percent of the world's copper from the town's depths. War profiteering and the company's extreme indifference to the safety of its employees (mortality rates in the mines were higher than in the trenches of Europe) led to Little's arrival. "The agitator" found in the desperate, agonized miners overwhelming support for his ideas, which included the abolishment of the wage system and the establishment of a socialist commonwealth.

In August 1917, Little was abducted by still-unknown assailants who hung him from a railroad bridge. Pinned to his chest was a note that read 3'-7'-77", dimensions of a Montana grave. Eight thousand people attended his funeral, the largest in Butte's history.

The murder provides AN INJURY TO ONE with a taut, suspenseful narrative, but it isn't the only story. Butte's history is bound with the entire history of the American left, the rise of McCarthyism, the destruction of the environment, and even the birth of the detective novel. Former Pinkerton detective Dashiell Hammett was rumored to have been involved in the murder, and later depicted it in Red Harvest.

Archival footage mixes with deftly deployed intertitles, while the lyrics to traditional mining songs are accompanied by music from William Oldham, Jim O'Rourke, and the band Low, producing an appropriately moody, effulgent, and strangely out-of-time soundtrack. The result is a unique film/video hybrid that combines painterly images, incisive writing, and a bold graphic sensibility to produce an articulate example of the aesthetic and political possibilities offered by filmmaking in the digital age.

eom

Very moving and super creative in its relating of capitalist brutality.

If you can, see it.

:thumbsup: :thumbsup: