Was Grandpa a Scab?

Note: Are you a westerner with ancestors from Missouri? The following guest post from Jarod Roll of the University of Sussex might explain your family tree. Roll was a student of mine back in the day at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, where he developed an interest in the labor history of the region. The following post comes from his current research on the use of strike breakers in the mining west.

1900 advertisement in Miners Magazine, 

the publication of the Western Federation 

of Miners.  From the Clarence Darrow
Digital Collection.

 Mine owners in Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene district ran a remarkable classified ad in local newspapers in June 1899. They needed 1,000 miners to work in their silver and lead mines. What job creators, you might think! But these were not new jobs. In May the mine owners, with the help of the state government and federal soldiers, had imprisoned most of the men who had previously dug the district’s metals in the infamous bullpen. In April the Coeur d’Alene locals of the Western Federation of Miners had gone on strike for union recognition and higher wages in the Bunker Hill & Sullivan mine in Wardner. While what happened is disputed, an April 29 union rally ended with the destruction of the Bunker Hill & Sullivan mill by dynamiters. The authorities quickly lowered the boom on the union. Governor Frank Steunenberg declared martial law, President William McKinley dispatched federal soldiers, all known union members and suspected radicals were detained without charge, and the military authorities instituted a permit system that effectively blacklisted foreign-born and union miners from working in the Coeur d’Alene. Such effective union-busting created a problem, however. Who would work in the mines? Help wanted!

What made the ad so remarkable was not the circumstances that necessitated it, but that the mine owners placed it in local newspapers in Joplin, Missouri, over 1,500 miles away. Why go so far, why Joplin? Located in Jasper County near Missouri’s border with Kansas and Oklahoma, Joplin was the heart of one of the nation’s leading metal mining districts. In the 1890s the district led the nation in zinc production and ranked third in lead. Joplin miners were good miners, used to working in hard ground, and did not belong to a union. This combination had led mine owners in Leadville, Colorado, to Joplin to find strikebreakers to cross WFM picket lines in 1896. It worked. In early 1897, mine owners in Ouray, Colorado, came to Joplin for strikebreakers. It worked again. By 1899, if you needed good, non-union miners willing to take on the
WFM, Joplin was the place to go. Joplin’s miners were the best strikebreakers money could hire.

In 1899 some miners went so far as to dynamite the

works of this Kellogg mine. Joplin strikebreakers

entered a volatile environment.

Hundreds of Joplin miners took the offer of employment in Idaho. By late summer, their work had brought most of the mines back into production. Their labor not only reinforced the owners’ heavy-handed union-busting strategy but also encouraged them to permanently replace the foreign-born miners of the WFM with native-born, non-union men. What had been a majority immigrant workforce in 1898 was two-thirds native-born American in 1901. The Joplin miners also benefited  Strikebreaking paid good wages! Many of the Joplin miners stayed on in Idaho. In 1904, for example, the owners’ employment agency reported that over 300 Missourians worked in the mines at Burke and Wallace, over 26% of the workforce. Some of the Joplin men went back to Missouri. Albert Torr, for example, used his earnings from strikebreaking to buy an interest in a Joplin mine. Others continued strikebreaking. In 1903, over 100 Joplin miners left Idaho to take strikebreaking work in Cripple Creek, Colorado.

Joplin strikebreakers left a poisoned legacy. Union miners rightly despised them. In Colorado, union miners coined a new phrase to describe the seeming ignorance and servility of Joplin strikebreakers: “I am from Joplin, you’ll have to show me.” Joplin miners would do anything their employers asked, the story went, but they were so ignorant that they had to be given careful instruction, to be shown. “Show me” began life as a term of opprobrium. In Idaho, “Joplin” and “Missourian” became synonyms for “scab,” or “cut-rate laborer.” Coeur d’Alene union miners even wrote a song, “Strike Breaker’s Lament,” that imagined the last words of dying Missouri strikebreaker:

I wish I was in Joplin, in Joplin down in Mo. . . .
Just then his voice it faltered, he ceased to murmur low,
His soul it went a-scooting to Joplin, Joplin, Mo.
His partner wept above him, and sadly fell his tears,
Then tried to drown his sorrow by drinking many beers;
He boxed the stiff and shipped him, as fast as he could go,
To the land of scabbing miners in Joplin, Joplin, Mo.

The mine owners got their 1,000 miners from Joplin in the end. Many of them stayed in Idaho. If you live there, look at your family tree. Do you have any ancestors from Missouri? If so, there is a good chance that they were scabs.

Jarod Roll teaches American History at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. He is the author of Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South and coauthor of The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America. He earned his BA at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, Joplin Mo.

New Film: Idaho's Forgotten War

In 1974 the Kutenai Tribe of Idaho declared war against the United states government in a dramatic bid to force the government to live up to its treaty obligations. Idaho's Forgotten War is a film on the topic by Sonya Rosario. It looks fascinating. Here is the trailer:



Idaho's Forgotten War will premiere Thursday, March 18th at Boise State University, Student Union Bldg, Simplot D at 6:30 p.m. I hope that it will be available online or by DVD soon.

Kalispel Encampment to Commemorate David Thompson

As part of an ongoing commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the initial encounter between explorer David Thompson and the native peoples of the northwest, there will be a Kalispel Encampment [PDF] June 24th through the 27th near the site of the original Kullyspel House in northern Idaho.

The four-day event will feature a teacher's workshop, educational activities, demonstrations of traditional skills, and a scholarly symposium titled “Tribes and Traders.”

For more details read the press release for the event or go to www.DavidThompson200.org to sign up.

Image: Detail from "Kalispel encampment with tepees among scattered trees" from the UW Digital Collections.]

Idaho's Controversial Lynching Mural

From the Spokesman-Review: "Murals depicting white settlers accosting and then hanging a shirtless Native American man have been displayed openly in Idaho’s temporary Statehouse for the past year, with a note from the state Historical Society promising that interpretation of the murals is 'forthcoming.'" The controversy of the mural goes back at least to 2006. The mural pictured here is apparently one is a series.


The murals were painted in the 1930s as part of a WPA project by artist Martin Fletcher. But Fletcher abandoned the project when he discovered that he could make more money painting portraits. The paintings were finished by "no fewer than 25 relief workers." When Martin toured the finished paintings he said they were "acceptable, but certainly nothing to write home about." Martin noted that "The finished product was further impaired when companion panels somehow were separated and now appear on different floors. For example, Indians charging down one staircase wall menace a steam locomotive, while the covered wagon train the Indians were suppose to be attacking hangs safely on another floor."

Interestingly, Martin's original design did include captions to explain the history that they were meant to depict--though I cannot find any record of what those captions were supposed to say. The murals were controversial from the time of their unveiling and lynching mural has spent much of the last decades hidden under a flag. The plaques that are going up (Plaque 1 | Plaque 2) have a generic quality to them, as one might expect of any committee-written prose: "To the California-based artists of the Great Depression era who completed this work, the murals represented their concept of how the West was won. During the 1930s, government-sponsored painters sought to portray strength and triumph, a nation overcoming adversity to settle a vast land."

This interpretation seems off the mark to me. The mural here is clearly not a celebration. The Indian looks too innocent and helpless, the white lynchers too sinister and matter-of-fact. People in the 1930s, when lynchings of African Americans and immigrants were still often in the news, would have recognized the mural as a crude metaphor for America's unjust treatment of American Indians.

Most likely Fletcher intended a piece of social commentary similar to some of Thomas Hart Benton's contemporaneous murals. See for example this panel from Benton's series "American Historical Epic" at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Fletcher's vision was lost when the actual painting of the murals fell to untrained WPA workers.

By the way, here is a great site that attempts to index all of the surviving WPA public art.