Vivid memories from Dunne, an activist in Montana at the time, as he details events surrounding the lynching of Frank Little.

‘August, 1917, in Butte: The Murder of Frank Little’ by William F. Dunne from Labor Defender. Vol. 1 No. 8. August, 1926.

THE house of Morgan’s adopted son, Woodrow Wilson, had launched the great American crusade to save the world from militarism four months before, 13,000 metal miners had been on strike for two months, 3,000 metal tradesmen had struck and, with the exception of the electrical workers, returned to work in Butte, Montana, the biggest, mining copper camp in the world, the miners and electricians were still fighting the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and its city, county and state government on August 1, when the battered body of Frank Little was found hanging from a Milwaukee railway trestle, back of the ruins of the old Clark smelter, southwest of the city that sunny morning.

The state militia had been brought in during the night and the strikers, talking in subdued tones of the lynching of Little, those who had not seen his corpse only half-believing the story, passed, on their way to Duggan’s undertaking parlor, the patrols with fixed bayonets and the machine guns at the principal street intersections.

The “company” had prepared well, with the help of its servile governor, Sam Stewart, a livery stable lawyer from Virginia City, for the outburst of indignation it knew would follow its crime.

As the hours passed and thousands of miners with the scars made by falling rock showing blue against their pale faces viewed the naked mutilated body of the man whose fiery speeches had earned their wild applause the day before, the dry atmosphere of Butte—6,000 feet above sea level—seemed to snap and crackle like an overcharged Leyden jar.

Stern faced and silent Finns, tight-lipped Slavs, the softly cursing Irishmen, passed thru the morgue where Little lay, looked at Little’s bloody body, went out into the sunny street, looked at the soldiers and machine guns, hitched at the heavy holster each had beneath his coat, walked quietly to the miners’ hall, or stood with groups of other workers—and watched.

It was one of those occasions when a random shot or a hasty blow can start a massacre. To this day I am not sure which would have been best—an open battle in the streets, with swift sure death for the soldiery, gunmen and stoolpigeons of the copper trust before the revolt would have been drowned in the blood of hundreds of workers, or the course chosen by the strike committee—an intensification of the strike, its extension to the Anaconda smelter.

I think the latter course was correct, but I am not sure. But of one thing I am sure.

It is that the line of action haying been decided, we did our level best to avenge Frank Little and succeeded.

It was no easy job but those of us whom the strike and the murder of Frank Little had placed in responsible positions were backed by men who came out and stayed out for six months in the only mass strike in a basic industry occurring in the war period.

We closed the Anaconda smelter, the largest in the world, the first time it had ever been closed by a strike. We stopped completely the production of that primary war necessity—copper—when it was selling for 26 1/2 cents per pound.

We defied successfully the city, county, state and federal government and we drove from the state every Wilsonian vulture who came to talk of “going back to work” no matter who they were—heads of international unions, spies of the “Alliance for Labor and Democracy,” federal mediators.

The copper press howled for blood, Montana senators and congressmen denounced us in Washington, charges of sedition were preferred and arrests made, the militia was replaced by “United States Guards”—the off-scourings of the underworld districts of the west—after the guardsmen had been caught distributing strike leaflets, the company gunmen encamped in their barracks at the Mountain View mine terrorized the city day and night, but the strike went on.

Photographs of the body of Frank Little became a symbol of the struggle. They were everywhere. The gunmen and the troops tore them down only to find them back again the next morning.

The hangers-on of the company, jubilant at first, began to mutter. The middle class of Butte was bankrupted by the strike and the pictures of Little seemed to look upon their ruin with a calm satisfaction.

There began to be talk of concessions to the miners, certain safety provisions were agreed to, wages were advanced.

The families were hungry and courage cannot take the place of food forever.

The strike ended. “The Butte Bulletin,” born of the strike and the murder of Little, began publication, and the struggle in Montana entered a new phase.

But the metal miners of the west remember Frank Little and not one among them thinks that the struggle in which Little gave his life was ended with his death.

Frank Little, crippled and able to walk only with a crutch, was slugged by thugs of the Anaconda Copper Company, as he lay asleep in his bed in a cheap’ lodging house on North Wyoming Street, tied to the back of an automobile and dragged to the trestle where his body, clothed in half of a suit of underwear, was found hanging.

On his breast was pinned a rectangular piece of cardboard signed with the emblem of the Vigilantes of the Montana pioneer period: 3-7-77.

On the card, printed in red chalk, was the letter, L, with a circle drawn around it, the letter D, with a cross under it and the letter C, standing for Campbell, chairman of the miners’ strike committee, and initials of other active strike leaders.

Campbell and I received duplicates of the Vigilante card thru the mail the day Little was hung with our addresses made up of letters clipped from newspapers.

On August 12, I received another similar card giving me until noon of that day to leave Montana. I left five years later.

The strike in which Little, in his capacity of I.W.W. organizer, came to take part began on June 7, when 164 miners were smothered to death in the Speculator disaster.

These miners were murdered by the company just as certainly as Little was. Most of their bodies were found, with their fingers worn down to the first joint, where they had tried to dig their way out from the gas thru solid concrete bulkheads where the state mining law made swinging bulkheads compulsory.

Organization work had been going on, there was much agitation against the “rustling card system,” the parade of the miners on June 5 had been broken up by gunmen and militia, the Finns and Irish had fraternized before and during this fight for the first time in the history of Butte, and the Speculator disaster brought things to a climax.

I was working in the Never Sweat mine (so-called with miners’ irony because in some of the stopes the temperature reached 130 degrees) as an electrician.

The electrical workers had trouble with the Montana Power Company, struck, pulled off the mine electricians in sympathy, made an agreement with the Metal Trades Council that if scabs were brought in on electrical work, the Metal Trades Council was to order all metal tradesmen off. The company employed scabs and the metal Trades Council kept its agreement.

Metal tradesmen and metal miner? were thus striking at the same time. The war was on and the patriotic fever was kept at a high pitch by the copper press. Strikes against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company — the lord of all it surveys in Montana—the second largest and second wealthiest state in natural resources in the union—are few and far between in ordinary times. In wartime they could not be tolerated.

The company was losing millions of dollars daily, the Wilson administration—the A.C.M. was pro-Wilson—was frantic. The copper press, which means every paper in the state taking the Associated Press service, and this means every daily with one minor exception, and any number of weeklies, was as rabid as a mad dog.

It called daily for action against the strike and the strike leaders—action of any kind. It harped insistently on the traditions of the old Vigilante days, and evidently in conformity with a well-thought out plan, advocated a return to the good old methods for the honor of the state and nation.

The day that Little was hung—his body was found at five o’clock in the morning—papers appearing in remote sections of the state printed laudatory editorial comment on the murder which could have been written only before the murder was committed. The Butte press was hysterically joyful.

The tie-up of the mines was so complete, the solidarity of the miners so unbreakable, the unexpected strike of the metal tradesmen, hitherto immune to anything in the nature of “radicalism,” was so disconcerting, that the A.C.M. decided to “pull something” that would enrage the miners, bring them into open armed combat with the government forces held in readiness, and drown the strike in blood.

They wanted to “get” anyone of three strike leaders. Frank Little they took because he was the easiest to get—he took no precautions—was an I.W.W. who utilized every strike meeting to denounce the war and because he was not of Irish extraction. His death would enrage the miners but would not rally all decisive elements among the workers in Butte.

They chose cunningly but their plan failed.

Little’s murder steeled the strikers to uncomplaining sacrifice in one of, if not the sternest and most trying struggle in American labor history.

Behind Little’s coffin, when we took him to his last resting place on the Butte “flats” where he lies with the miners murdered in the shafts, drifts, stopes and raises of the A.C.M.—marched 7,000 workers—the workers he gave his life for—marched I.W.W.’s with red ribbons on their arms, A.F. of L. trade unionists with their craft banners, workers with no union affiliation and even some of the lower sections of the middle class trying as best they could to disassociate themselves from the scarlet crime of their masters.

On the sidewalks stood thousands more who sympathized.

So great was the mass of mourners that the guns the pall bearers carried were not needed because for once the A.C.M. was afraid to carry out a threat–to stop the funeral which five thousand “hard rock” miners had sworn should not be stopped.

Who killed Frank Little?

The Anaconda Mining Company.

You are still curious?

Then I can say only that his murderers never have been tried in a court of law.

But Butte is Butte.

Company-ridden and reactionary, the labor unions riddled with company stool-pigeons, voting mostly the democrat ticket, it has a peculiar code of working class honor.

I recite for your benefit only recent history—without comment. Rumor has it that there were five men directly involved in the actual murder.

Peter Prlja, a motorcycle policeman, once an A.C.M. gunman, before he came to America one of the Royal Guards of the King of Montenegro, was shot five times in the head with a 25 calibre Colt automatic—and killed—by one Burzan on the corner of Main and Park streets, Butte.

Tried for murder, the jury acquitted Burzan in twenty minutes.

The foreman of the jury explained the delay by saying that there was one ignorant fellow on the jury who thought Burzan should get a little something for carrying concealed weapons.

Edward Morrissey, chief of detectives in Butte, former bodyguard of Cornelius Kelley, vice-president of the A.C.M., was exposed by the Butte Daily Bulletin as the murderer of his wife.

His body was found later in a rooming house where it had lain for five days. Some say that he had been killed elsewhere and brought back to await discovery by curious persons with sensitive noses.

Oscar Rohn, head of the Pittsmont Mine and Smelter Company, once accused of being a German spy, but later proved to be a leading patriot and a partner of one William Gillie, an official of the A.C.M., in the laudable enterprise of robbing the A.C.M. thru the medium of a rich mining lease, fell—or was pushed—into a shaft on his own property as the skip was coming up. His head was taken off with much more neatness and dispatch than was displayed in the hanging of Frank Little.

But these stories are collected from the Montana press, which is notoriously unreliable.

For instance:

In August, 1917, I went up to Great Falls, 172 miles north of Butte, to try and get the metal tradesmen out in sympathy with the Butte workers. I had spoken to a meeting of boilermakers and, contrary to my usual custom in those stirring days, was going to my hotel alone.

As I passed the mouth of an alley, three men leaped out at me. I shot from my pocket with a .32 Colt. Two of the assailants dropped and the third ran.

So did I.

I got to my hotel, locked the door, and debated with myself whether to shoot it out when the demand came for my surrender or to give myself up.

But nothing happened and I finally went to sleep. The next morning the Great Falls papers carried nothing on this occurrence of the night before.

When the Butte train came in I bought a copy of “The Butte Miner”—one of the most vicious of the copper sheets—and saw a three column headline: “Dunne Disappears—Taken From Train Between Butte and Great Falls.”

At Helena, the capital of the state, 72 miles north of Butte, I was met by one of the electrical workers’ union strike committee who handed me the second Vigilante notice which had come to the headquarters during my absence. As stated before, it gave me until 12 o’clock noon of that day—August 12—to leave Montana.

I knew that I had not disappeared and my faith in the accuracy of the Montana copper press was sadly shaken.

So I give the stories of the fate which has overtaken some of the suspected slayers of Frank Little only for what they are worth.

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1926/v01n08-aug-1926-LD.pdf