You could easily pass by Calumet, Michigan, on US highway 41 without much notice. You'd see the red, iron-ore tinted sandstone buildings that look as though they must have been built at significant expense a hundred or so years ago. They are still standing, owing more to the timeless nature of their materials than to any sort of lavish maintenance and upkeep. Industry and commerce, as such, hardly exists here anymore, and there is little to indicate that almost a century ago Calumet was the site of one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the organized labor movement in the United States.
Calumet, in Michigan's Keweenaw peninsula sits high above the Portage channel separating neighboring Hancock and Houghton to the immediate south. It is perhaps the northernmost city of any consequence in Michigan, just a half-hour or so from the very northern tip of the Upper Peninsula. The 2000 census lists the population at 879, and these days, Calumet's downtown area resembles those of other villages in Michigan that have seen great prosperity come and go and now find themselves searching for rebirth as fledgling artist communities, incubation centers for small businesses or technology startups.
After a long economic hibernation for the area, there are signs that the serene small town is beginning to experience something of a renaissance, with a gallery and a few new restaurants occupying some of the oldest buildings on main street. The ornate Calumet theatre, built in 1909, is once again supporting a full calendar of events for the summer tourist season, including a July performance by the Marshall Tucker band, and the Celtic Music group, "Gaelic Storm" for the second year in a row.
Calumet (known as "Red Jacket" until 1929) was once at the center of a thriving copper industry and briefly wielded so much wealth and political clout that it almost became the capitol of the state of Michigan, narrowly losing a vote on the issue to the current day capitol of Lansing.
The area was settled by a large contingent of Scandinavian (primarily Finnish) and French immigrants who provided a steady supply of cheap labor for the copper mines and mills in spite of the low-pay and dangerous working conditions.The copper industry produced vast amounts of wealth for the mine operators through the last half of the nineteenth century and the first several decades of the twentieth century. There was plenty of high-grade copper ore available relatively close to the surface and at steadily-increasing depths eventually reaching to thousands of feet.
Beginning in the early 1900's, the fact that the area was producing some of the richest mine owners and the poorest miners was not lost on the miners themselves. There began intense discussion in the immigrant communities regarding the increasing disparity in wealth between mine management the miners, as well as cost-cutting measures that were exaggerating the perils associated with the work. That discussion was not isolated to northern Michigan as immigrant-laborers with Scandinavian roots in the neighboring state of Minnesota were already forming chapters of a nascent Socialist Worker's party.
By 1904, the Finns had begun to organize a national political movement based on a loose association with the Socialist Party. Not all of the Finns involved in the organizing activity wanted to be closely affiliated with the Socialists, however. A visit to the Finnish Heritage center's archives in Hancock reveals that the miners intra-movement struggles and their struggles with the owners were much-discussed in the labor-oriented weekly newspapers of the time. The pages of the left-wing Sosialisti, published in Duluth, and somewhat more moderate Työmies (The Working Man), published locally in Hancock depicted an energized labor movement in search of it's ideology. After the moderate and more socialist-leaning political groups of the labor movement joined forces, Työmies later emerged as the leading voice of the movement with decidedly leftward editorial slant. At last, the movement had established strong organizing principles and would be in a position to pursue its goal of improving the miners lot in life. Socialism for Socialism's sake was not the primary reason for the unification of the various labor and citizen's movements; most of the farmers/miners/millworkers who were active in the party were not Marxist ideologues - they simply believed in social justice and wanted safe working conditions with fair pay.
1913 was a pivotal year for the miner's labor movement in Calumet. The Calument and Hecla mine made changes to the labor arrangement and pay that seriously affected the miner's livelihood and their safety. The introduction of pneumatic drills meant that the two-man drilling teams were now reduced to single-man operations and that the daily pay (ranging from $2.75 to $4) would not be increased for the drill operators now doing the work of two men. The drills were a new technology and not necessarily designed for ergonomic operating comfort, to reduce operating fatigue, or increase the safety of the operation. Days were typically 10 hours in length and it was not unusual for boys of twelve years of age to work in force in the mines for those same, long hours at great depths within the mines.
The C and H miner's strike finally began late that summer and it was immediately clear that the mine owners were in no mood to yield to the strikers demands, the C & H mine manager vowed that the miners would "learn what it means to exist on a diet of potato pairings" before C & H would acquiesce to the miners demands.
On Christmas Eve 1913, the striking miners and their families gathered for a party sponsored by the Western Federation of Miners on the second floor of the Italian Hall in Calumet. Anne Clemenc of Calumet, a croatian miner's wife who organized the Woman's Alliance (who later went on to play a significant role in shaping the labor movement in Michigan) arranged for the party and it was well attended, with guests numbering in the several hundred.
At some point, late in the evening someone yelled "FIRE!" aloud, most likely up the lone stairway leading up from the double-door, street-level front entrance. This caused a stampede for the lone stairway and set of doors. The doors would not open, and quickly, Seventy-three men, women, and children died as a result of being crushed and suffocated. The doors opened outward, not inward, as is sometimes incorrectly stated. But why didn't they open? Were they locked? Was something or someone holding them shut? The question has never been definitively answered. No evidence of an actual fire of any kind was ever found.
The mortuary was unprepared to handle the large number of corpses from the hall, and there are some disturbingly heart-wrenching photographs that depict the bodies of old and young alike, still in their clothes from the party, crowded onto makeshift examination tables in the Calumet Theatre Ballroom, while the miners attempted to cope with the emotional weight of the catastrophe and figure out how to bury their dead at the same time.
A large number of plain, pine-box wooden coffins were quickly rounded up for the victims, and a funeral procession was organized on a snowy, cold and bleak, December day soon afterwards. There are still more stark photographs commemorating this event. In them, there are thousands of mourners on foot in the procession and it stretches for blocks through downtown Calumet.
The coroner's inquest and subsequent hearings held soon after the tragedy cleared the mine owners or any of their minion of any direct involvement in the tragedy. Michigan attorney and historical writer Steve Lahto vehemently disagrees, however. While writing his excellent book on the subject, "Death's Door," Steve reviewed all of the available transcripts, interviews, eyewitness testimony, police investigation records, and medical evidence on the subject. He asserts that the culprit was most likely the management of the mine. This is still inconclusive but Lehto has produced the most comprehensive review and investigation of the incident to date.
The strike ended a few months later with the mine owners agreeing to reducing hours and a nominal increase in pay for the miners. Charles Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners was subsequently shot and kidnapped in Hancock not long afterward by members of the "Citizen's Alliance", a group affiliated with the mine owners. Moyers escaped and re-emerged a few days later in Chicago, holding a news conference and displaying his gunshot wound. He returned to Northern Michigan and continued to work on organizing activities.
All that remains of the Italian Hall in Calumet is the original stone archway that held the doors to the Italian Hall, and a plaque commemorating the incident.