Your Cheatin' Heart: The Story of the Jackson Raley's Strike, Part I

By Michael Israel and David Roddy

 Your cheatin' heart
Will make you weep
You'll cry and cry
And try to sleep
But sleep won't come
The whole night through
Your cheatin' heart

Photo credit Layla Griffin

The parking lot of Raley's supermarket in Jackson, California, was close to empty the evening of November 11, 2012. A thin, twenty-something man held his toddler and danced, whispering to his son the words to “Your Cheatin' Heart” as Hank Williams blasted from the cassette player of an aging Toyota pickup truck parked nearby. The man’s wife, a deli worker for the store, glanced angrily at a family of customers walking calmly passed her picket sign and into the store, where a waiting strike-breaker politely opened the door. The cheerful demeanor of the picket crossers defied Hank's prediction of a guilty conscience playing in the background.

Jackson is the heart of Amador County, a small county at the western foot of the Sierra Nevadas. Amador shares features in common with rural communities across the West: mostly white, Catholic, working class, and Republican. The county is home to the state’s largest Tea Party, and a majority of the county voted in favor of Proposition 32, an anti-union state ballot initiative. Unsurprisingly, the November strike at Raley’s polarized the community, demonstrating at once the optimism of labor's resurgence and the pitfalls facing a revitalized workers movement.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of the IWW in the Mother Lode and the Jackson Socialistic Circle (Post 3)

Malicious Miners and Pernicious Pinkertons
By David Roddy
Note: this is the second post in a series on the Haywood, Moyer, and Pettiboone trial.

Famed Pinkerton private detective James McParland.

To fully understand the union movement in the California gold mines after the 1903 strike, one must first travel eastward to Idaho, where politics inescapably hung around the investigation of the assassination of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg in late December, 1905. State prosecutors focused on charging the leaders of the Western Federation of Miners with conspiracy to commit the bombing that took his life. Idaho Governor Frank Gooding telegraphed the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to lead the investigation.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of the IWW in the Mother Lode and the Jackson Socialistic Circle (Post 2)

Assassination and Repression in Idaho
By David Roddy

Idaho governor
Frank Steunenberg

Temperatures dropped to miserable in Caldwell, Idaho, as the days waned for the year of 1905. Indeed, the temperature hovered around 20 degrees that winter, and ex-Governor Frank Steunenberg must have been chilled in spite of his six foot frame as he walked home through the snow on the night of December 30th . As he opened the gate to his yard, however, the snow and ice around him superheated as a flash of light, heat, and sound stripped him of his senses.

Other townspeople rushed towards the blast, which shattered all the windows of his house facing the street. Lying face down by the gate, amongst broken glass, splintered wood, and singed cloth, they found the governor. He was naked, as the explosion had burned his clothes away but for a few singed rags. Red pulp hung from his thighs, and chunks of his obliterated legs lay strewn around him.

“Who shot me?” he murmured to the growing crowd around him, before telling them to turn him over. Twenty minutes later, he was dead.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of the IWW in the Mother Lode and the Jackson Socialistic Circle (Post 1)

By David Roddy
Two-Gun Men from the West

Cowboy, Homesteader, Miner, and Socialist
"Big Bill" Haywood

Many of the gold mineworkers of Amador County were not simply interested in better wages and the eight-hour day. They dreamed of a movement that could break above the surface of their subterranean world and unite all working people. But socialism wasn't confined to the fantasies of a few dreamers, in fact, the socialist movement in the first decades of the 20th century was inexorably bound to organized labor. The Western Federation of Miners, under which all of Amador County’s hard-rock mineworkers organized, officially aligned itself with the Socialist Party in 1900, and the union’s leadership tended to be active members in the party.

The Tea Party vs. History

By David Roddy

History, by definition, has already happened. While intelligent revisionism and creative thinking can enlighten our understanding, contemporary forces cannot modify history itself. Those that try, deny the existence of an objective reality, and do so because, in the iconic words of George Orwell: “He who controls the past, controls the future."

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 13)

1886 engraving of the Haymarket Affair

Ending the Strike
By David Roddy

On May 1, 1903, the Amador Dispatch reported that the great Amador gold mine strike had ended. The date of this announcement was frustratingly fitting, as exactly 18 years previously the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions declared a standard eight-hour workday, prompting mass marches and strikes across the country and culminating into clashes between Chicago protesters and police in what is now known as the “Haymarket Affair.” Workers lost the fight for an eight-hour workday in 1886 in the United States, and the miners of Amador County lost the fight in 1903.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 12)

A Week of Confusion

By David Roddy (Previous posts in this series here.)

The week between Friday the 17th and 24th of April 1903 shut down the gold mining communities of Amador County. Until the mine-owners guaranteed an eight-hour workday, higher wages, and recognition of the Jackson and Amador Miners Unions, the miners refused to work.

1883 cartoon depicting the American workman tied to the fire of monopoly.
From Puck Magazine.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 11)

By David Roddy (Previous posts in this series here.)


Sheriff T.K. Norman and the Jackson Miners Union

The year was 1903, the month was April, and the gold miners of Amador County were on strike. Hundreds of miners, primarily Italian and Austrian immigrants, patrolled the parameter of the mines as other miners made their way to work, pleading with them to join the strike. By April 17, all the mines around Jackson were closed.

Conservative forces in early 20th century America painted European immigrants
as stealing from Anglo-American wage earners. Mine owners and newspapers in
Amador County blamed such immigrants for labor upheavals.
Image from Judge Magazine.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 10)

The union organizer as a noxious weed that
blooms every spring, from the conservative
Democrat "Puck Magazine."

By David Roddy

Note: See previous posts here.

STRIKE!
April 17^th, 1903        
They posted the notices all around the mines of Sutter Creek and Jackson, up and down the main streets of those towns, tacked onto church and city hall walls. The April rain smudged the ink, but the stark clarity of the message remained intact.

Strike Notice-Notice is hereby given to all men of Jackson district that a strike is declared on all mines and mills of Oneida, Zeila, Gwin, Kennedy, Central Eureka, and South Eureka Mines.

  Crews of around two mineworkers each guarded all the roads and trails leading to the mines, turning around men on foot and horseback on their way to work in the morning. The strike was on.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 9)

By David Roddy

Note: Here is a list of all previous posts in descending order.
Fifty Good Miners



"The Tournament of Today--A Set-To Between Labor and Monopoly." Date unknown.

Five miners are waiting in an old Western room; their expressions grave despite the blossoming hillsides and fluttering birds outside the dusty windows. On the table before them lay three sheets of paper, one for each superintendent of three local mines. Each reads:

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 8)

By David Roddy

Western Federation Expands


The hard rock mines of the Southern Sierra dot the foothills like acne on the face of an unhygienic teenager. The collection of mines scattered around the town of Jackson accounted for only a fraction of the mineworkers in Amador County. North of Jackson, along the undulating grassland and oak forests above the mother lode, is Amador City. At the turn of the last century, Amador City provided lodging and services to the men who drilled and blasted into the quartz bed beneath it. Like their Jackson counterparts, the mine owners expected their employees to work ten-hour shifts for $2.50.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 7)

By David Roddy

Synopsis of past posts:

Post 1: “49ers” remove most of the placer gold in the southern mines of California during the last decades of the 1800s, deeper mines to remove gold from quartz beds attract capitalist investment which in turn exploits cheap immigrant labor.


Post 2: Parallel developments across the Western United States lead to miners unionizing to demand wage increases and safer workplaces. In 1893, the Western Federation of Miners unites these unions and grows after a successful strike in Cripple Creek Colorado in 1894.

Post 3: In 1901, Jackson mine owners preemptively threaten to fire any unionized workers as well as anybody that showed sympathies to a rumored union. The WFM becomes militant after a series of violent strikes, advocates socialism and the possibility of armed insurrection against the capitalist class. Local newspapers side with mine owners.

Post 4: On September 6 of 1901, self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinates President William McKinley. This triggers a national panic against immigrants, anarchists and leftists. The cacophony around the national red-scare silences any rumors of a Jackson miners union.

Post 5: The Jackson Miners’ Union, No. 115 of the Western Federation of Miners, announces its presence in the fall of 1902, much to the horror of local newspapers. Newly inaugurated President Theodore Roosevelt deals peaceably with striking coal miners in Pennsylvania, giving labor unions a credibility in national media.

Post 6: Jackson Miners Union president Frank O’Connell writes a letter to Amador Dispatch calling for a socialist economy. Both Republican and Democratic newspapers attack the Jackson Miners Union.

Tensions Build On the 28th of November in 1902, the Amador Dispatch quoted an editorial from the San Luis Obispo Breeze titled “Organized Labor the Safeguard of Society.”

A broad view of the labor movement, which recognizes the fact that there is an abundance for all, is the only tenable ground. Keep up the organization, and benefits will come as fast as outside conditions will warrant. The safety of all depends upon the intelligent organization of labor.

"TR teaches the childish coal barons a lesson"
From Wikipedia.

Toleration for labor unions became increasingly fashionable as the United States entered the “Progressive Era.” The treatment of striking anthracite coal miners as equals to their employers by the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt strengthened public sympathy towards the cause of organized labor. The admittedly conservative president of the American Federation of Labor Samuel Gompers went so far as to state in his 1925 autobiography:

Several times I have been asked what in my opinion was the most important single incident in the labor movement in the United States and I have invariably replied: the strike of the anthracite miners in Pennsylvania ... from then on the miners became not merely human machines to produce coal but men and citizens.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of the Jackson Miner's Union (Post 6)

By David Roddy

Posts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5
Growing Pains
A tempest of controversy followed the formation of the Jackson Miners Union No. 115 in the autumn of 1902. Both the Republican Ledger and Democratic Dispatch met the presence of the Western Federation of Miners—an always socialist and occasionally revolutionary labor union—with hostility and bewilderment. Local business men also felt threatened by the Miners Union, which attempted to alleviate their anxiety in an October 10th letter published in the Amador Dispatch by stating that “The members of this organization are the men who work the mines in this vicinity and their earning make it possible for many of their critics to remain in business.”

Workers at Amador's Zeila gold mine, 1910.

The media, mine superintendents, and businessmen were not the only forces antagonizing the Union. The WFM advocated “industrial unionism,” which organized workers by an entire industry instead of by a single craft or trade. Industrial unions had a strong ideological framework that declared that people could only be truly free when they took control of their work place and broke away from a dependency on wages. This inclusive model made the lowest paid workers essential for a successful organizing drive, as they were the bulk of laborers.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 5)

By David Roddy

Note: Part five of a series. Please see posts 1,2,3 & 4.
Jackson Miners Union, W.F.M. No. 115

On September 5th, 1902, one day away from the first anniversary of the McKinley assassination, the Amador Ledger ran an article descriptively titled “Reported Miners' Union.” The Ledger had adopted the platform of the Republican, which, under McKinley’s presidency, fostered a sympathetic attitude towards big business. Unsurprisingly, the Ledger antagonized the Union even prior to its official inception. The paper stated that:

“Reports have been current in Jackson and throughout the county that an effort is being made to organize a miners' labor union in this county, with headquarters in Jackson. Meetings have been bold in the basement known as the Olympus cafe for three successive nights, for the purpose of launching a now secret society.”

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 4)

By David Roddy
Note: Please read Posts 1,2 & 3.

A Shot Across the Land

A group of spectators lined up one early September afternoon outside the doors of the Temple of Music, erected for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901. They had come to a meet and greet with the President of the United States, William McKinley. Leon Czolgosz, the 28-year-old son of Polish immigrants, nervously stepped out of the hot September afternoon sun into the Temple. A series of strikes he witnessed while working in a steel factory as a child radicalized Czolgosz, and as an adult, he became obsessed with anarchist philosophy. Czolgosz wrapped his right hand in bandages, and McKinley, assuming he was injured, offered his left hand instead. Czolgosz smacked this gesture away and pulled the trigger of the revolver hidden under the bandages, firing two bullets into the President’s gut.

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 3)

By David Roddy

Note: Please read Post 1 and Post 2 before continuing.

Rumors of a Jackson Miners Union

On the 26th of August of 1901, the superintendents from the Kennedy, Argonaut, South Eureka and Zeila gold mines in Jackson convened to address a new social movement rippling across mine communities in the western United States. “It has been reported that the Miners of Amador County have created and organized, or are about to create and organize, a society known as and called a MINERS’ UNION, for the purpose of increasing the current wages and reducing the hours of labor at the Mines in this Mining District.” Miners worked ten hours a day for less than a dollar a day, but the superintendents insisted, “The current wages are fair and the hours of labor reasonable.”

The Ground We Walk On: A History of The Jackson Miners Union (Post 2)

By David Roddy
The Western Federation of Miners: A Brief Introduction


In May of 1893 miners and union organizers from Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and Utah formed the Western Federation of Miners to use the collective power of organized labor to raise working conditions and wages. The WFM convened in Butte City Montana to deliberate on a constitution, and the statement of principles within the preamble declared that “Since there is scarcely any fact better known than that civilization has for centuries progressed in proportion to the production and utilization of the metals, precious and 'base, and most of the comforts enjoyed by the great majority of mankind are due to this progress, the men engaged in the hazardous and unhealthy occupation of mining should receive a fair compensation for their labor, and such protection from the law as will remove needless risk to life and health ; we therefore deem it necessary to organize the Western Federation of Miners of America for the purpose of securing by education and organization, and wise legislation, a just compensation for our labor and the right to use our earnings free from dictation by any person whatsoever.”

The Ground We Walk On: A History of the Jackson Miners Union (Post 1)

By David Roddy

“The barbarous gold barons--they did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!”
William “Big Bill” Haywood, organizer for the Western Federation of Miners, Industrial Workers of the World, and Socialist Party of America.

Introduction: Rebellion Beneath the Wild West

The songs of the mines permeated Jackson, a steady percussion of turning gears and cranking levers while whistling boilers and gushing water provided the accompanying chorus. The melody had no end, continuing throughout the day and night as men toiled beneath the earth. It claimed ownership of the community, and must have reminded a group of men who skipped work one warm May morning of the constant presence of the mines.

A different time: the Kennedy Mine & Mill, Jackson, Ca.

A group of seventy or so gathered on Main Street, preparing to parade. They shouted slogans in English, Italian, and Austrian while waving a forty-five starred American flag. Strange as all this sounds, perhaps the most peculiar detail was what the miners flew alongside Old Glory. For this is May Day 1906, and what flourished above the parading workers and their wives that morning was the red flag of the socialists.