The Tragedy That Silenced a Small Michigan Town

On December 24th, 1913, a man walked into a crowded party and shouted a single, fateful word: “Fire!”

That word was enough to kick off a panic that led to disaster. By the end of the night, 73 people would be dead, most of them children. But who was this man? And why did he shout fire when there was no fire?

This is the story of the Italian Hall Disaster, a horrible and preventable tragedy. It takes place on a cold night in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where a long and bitter mining strike left the town desperate for some Christmas cheer. Unfortunately, their party ended with fifty-nine child-sized coffins and more questions than answers.

But there is so much more to that night in 1913 than the deaths. The Italian Hall Disaster involves striking miners, hired thugs, the American Dream, a congressional investigation, and a song from singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie. And yet, it is nowhere near as well known as it deserves to be.

A History of Copper Country

The native people of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula were aware that it was rich in a red, shiny metal now called copper. But it wasn’t until the 1840s that American businesses realized exactly how much there was and how much money could be made in extracting it.

Luckily, just as newspapers were running stories on the discovery of one of the richest copper deposits in the United States, another mine was shutting down. Cornwall, England had been a copper mine for generations, but the ore was finally drying up. Workers worried about losing their jobs decided to pack up and move to America. As many as 10,000 miners left England in 1875 alone, and many of them ended up in northern Michigan. For foodies, this is why the U.P. is known for Cornish pasties.

Since the Cornish immigrants got there first, they were the ones that set up the mine system. As a result, they ran a lot like Cornish mines and the “cousin jacks” often got the best jobs.

Several companies tried setting up shop in “Copper Country,” but the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company emerged as the leader. This Boston-based corporation owned all the land surrounding the mines. They invested in their worker’s happiness by supplying housing, schools, transportation, and entertainment centers. At first glance, it looked like a pretty good deal. But when the mining company owns absolutely everything, they have ultimate control.

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, a wave of immigrants arrived in the United States from Eastern and Southern Europe. Michigan’s copper towns became the home of Finns, Swedes, Croatian, Italians, Poles, Austrians, and Germans. In 1900, the population of Calumet was 90% immigrant. But despite the diversity of languages and cultures, the children of the original Cornish immigrants remained in charge.

Essentially, there were three jobs in a mine. Surface workers stayed above ground and did the administrative tasks. Below ground, the miners used drills to extract copper by blasting away unwanted rock. And then there were trammers, who hauled the useless rock pieces to the surface for disposal.

The jobs were largely segregated based on ethnicity. Manager and surface jobs went to English, Scandinavian, and German immigrants. Meanwhile, trammers, who worked long hours at the most exhausting and backbreaking job in the mine, received the lowest pay. And everyone knew that trammers were mostly Italian, Finnish, and Croatian.

Now, mine work is very dangerous. It involves traveling hundreds or even thousands of feet below ground with nothing more than a few candles. And after arriving at the worksite, miners had to drill out the copper one laborious inch at a time. As can be expected in professions that involve flying rock, accidents were common. In an average week, ten miners were injured and one died. Many of the recent immigrants hadn’t fully realized what they were signing up for and found the experience terrifying.

Despite the dangers, the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company chugged along uninterrupted for years. But slowly, things began to change. In 1874, the company was able to pull 97 pounds of sellable copper for every ton of rock that was dug out of the ground. In 1900, they only got 53 pounds. The copper deposits in the Keweenaw Peninsula might be rich, but they weren’t inexhaustible.

To make matters worse, open pit mines had recently opened in the American Southwest and they were quickly taking over the market. In order to compete in this new landscape, the mining company resolved to maximize the efficiency of every worker. And, it turned out, this would turn the entire world of Copper Country upside down.

In 1911, a new water-based drill made a splash on the mining scene. The older models required two or three men to operate. This new model only required one. To the mining companies, it was maximum efficiency.

The miners, however, saw this as a sign that 50% of their coworkers were about to be laid off. But their opposition to the one-man drill went deeper than that. Life in Copper Country centered on family both above and below ground. The other person running your drill was not a randomly assigned coworker, but likely a close family member. In other words, someone who you deeply cared about and had a vested interest in their employment status.

There was also a safety concern with the one-man drill. In the mine, a second person not only kept away the heebie-jeebies, but meant that someone was available to get help in an emergency. The end of this buddy system was so frightening that the miners nicknamed the one-man drill “the widowmaker.”

Previously, trammers hung out with trammers and miners hung out with miners. In fact, miners thought they had more in common with the management than the trammers. But when the company announced that they would move forward with the one-man drill despite their protests, the miners realized that management was not on their side after all.

It was at this moment that a new player walked onto the scene. It was the Western Federation of Miners, also known as the WFM. And they had a plan to unite all the workers under one banner: a union.

Strike!

The man who arrived in Calumet to accomplish this goal was Charles H. Moyer, the president of the Western Federation of Miners. He was a man with a fascinating story and a colorful past.

Born in the Midwest at the end of the American Civil War to a poor family, a teenage Moyer decided to quit school and move west. He then became something of a stereotype, because he worked as a cowboy and served a year in prison for robbery. But after getting a job at a mine in South Dakota’s Black Hills, Moyer realized that he had a talent for labor organizing. He was elected president of the Western Federation of Miners in 1902 and promptly made a name for himself in what would become known as the Colorado Labor Wars.

In 1903, a group of WFM miners went on strike in Colorado Springs. Governor James Peabody, who was staunchly anti-union, declared the strike to be an insurrection and imposed martial law. The Colorado militia was called in to arrest the striking miners en masse, as well as deport as many as possible. Moyer was caught up in the mass arrests. He demanded a writ of habeas corpus, which is an official reason for his imprisonment by the state. His request eventually made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Moyer v. Peabody that governors do not need probable cause to arrest people during an insurrection.

The military was successful in breaking the Colorado strike, and the experience made Moyer into an unapologetic socialist.

In 1906, Moyer was arrested for the murder the former governor of Idaho. The evidence was incredibly flimsy. A former bodyguard of Moyer’s was suspected of building a bomb and he named various WFA members as co-conspirators. Moyer had a pretty good alibi, since he was in Colorado, but that didn’t stop his name from appearing in national newspapers. The bodyguard was later found innocent by a jury and charges against Moyer were dropped. The incident nonetheless solidified him as a certified rabble-rouser.

So when the copper bosses in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula heard that Moyer was unpacking a suitcase just as their workers were getting antsy, they were not pleased with the news. They wanted him out of town on the next train.

But socialist or not, Moyer was good at his job. The Western Federation of Miners recruited a multilingual staff so they could communicate with the many different immigrants. They informed them that the new open pit mines paid an average of $4.00 a day, compared to the $2.50 the workers in Keweenaw received. They also described their victories in winning an 8-hour workday, an appealing prospect for employees who usually worked ten-and-a-half hour shifts.

And, of course, they promised to bring back the two-man drill.

By spring 1913, the Western Federation of Miners handed out nine thousand union membership cards. They were ready to state their demands. In a letter to management, the union asked to be acknowledged as the official collective bargaining unit for the workers and laid out their planned improvements.

The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company was silent. They believed that if they even acknowledged that they had received the letter, the union would take that as official recognition. So, they played dumb. The WFM felt they had no other option but to call a strike.

In some parts of the world, labor strikes are a part of everyday life. But in the United States in 1913, they were deadly serious. From the moment the first railroad barons started to consolidate their power, they planned to keep control of their labor force by any means necessary. The bloody history would have been familiar to both the mining company and their employees. They both knew this had the potential to end badly. But they had no idea just how bad it would get.

On June 23rd, as many as ten thousand miners laid down their tools. No one in Copper Country was mining copper.

June can be a dreary month in northern Michigan, and the twenty-third was no different. Clouds covered the sky and the ground dotted with raindrops. But despite the cooler temperatures, long-simmering ethnic tensions boiled over. Scattered fights broke out in Calumet, but only three injuries were documented. All were supervisors of Cornish descent reporting that they’d been hit by a rock.

These playground antics were all the company needed to bring out the big guns. They convinced the Michigan governor that their town was overrun by an angry mob and they needed the National Guard to restore order. The entire force of 2,500 men was sent to Copper Country.

But the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company wanted more than just soldiers to defend the peace and protect their property. They wanted people who could break the strike and get their workers back into the mines. They needed a detective agency.

Now, these detective agencies are often remembered romantically. But their services went far beyond solving crimes and smoking pipes. In addition to private investigations, the agencies also offered private security. They had the power to carry guns, make arrests, and even beat miners into submission. If a company wanted to break a strike, a detective agency was their first stop.

The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company might not have acknowledged the union, but they had paid for the services of the Waddell-Mahon Corporation two weeks before the strike even started. And even better, they got to use taxpayer money to fund it. It just so happened that the head of the mining company was also the head of the Board of Supervisors for the county. He decided that hiring strikebreakers was in the public’s best interest.

That fact that it was also in his own best interest was purely coincidental, obviously.

The detectives tried to blend it, but townspeople spotted them anyway. “They are tall, muscular men of the prize fighter variety,” said a union newsletter.

For good measure, the mining company also hired men from the Burns Detective Agency, the Ascher Detective Agency and the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Some of them were officially deputized by the Houghton County Sheriff’s Office, giving them police power over the striking miners.

A showdown was about to begin.

The Union vs. Citizens Alliance

The problem with strikes is that they have a tendency to get boring. It’s essentially protesting working conditions by refusing to work. Not working isn’t exactly the kind of thing that rouses crowds or gets media attention.

So unions need something for people to do that isn’t work. They also need something attention-grabbing. And ideally, something that shames people who aren’t part of the strike. Hence, the picket line. The workers are all together, often chanting, singing, or holding signs outside the business that they are protesting. This not only attracts the attention of the public, but those who are still working have to walk past their picketing co-workers to clock in.

But the miners of Calumet took this one step further. Instead of a picket line, they opted for a picket parade. After all, the whole town was basically owned by the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. There wasn’t exactly one place to protest. And who doesn’t love a parade?

As with all things in Copper Country, striking was a family affair. Women joined their fathers, husbands, and sons in the strike parade, both to show their solidarity and to protect them. If the National Guard, the sheriff’s deputies, or the Waddell-Mahon detectives wanted to arrest the men for striking, they would have to go through their wives, mothers, and daughters first.

Leading the up to two thousand people was Annie Clemenc. She was the eldest daughter in a family of Slovenian immigrants and had recently married a Croatian miner named Joe. Called “Big Annie” because she stood at six feet and two inches, she wore a simple gingham dress and carried a large American flag on a ten-foot pole. Her image at the front of the parade, flag in hand, became an icon of the copper strike.

As the days turned into weeks, the strike parade faced more and more pushback from law enforcement. Annie refused to be intimidated. She faced the police and National Guard head on and allowed herself to be arrested. At one point, a soldier asked why she didn’t stay home like a normal wife. Annie replied, “My work is here, and nobody can stop me. I’m going to keep at it until this strike is won.”

The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company hadn’t been too worried when the strike broke out. They had plenty of copper ready to sell and lots of cash to tide themselves over. But the strike kept going, and the mines were still at a standstill. They needed to get production going again, and the idea of negotiating with the union to get their workers back never even crossed their mind.

Instead, agents were sent to eastern port cities to recruit immigrants literally right off the boat. These new workers, who’d probably never heard of Calumet and knew nothing about the strike, were put on a one-way train and sent straight into the mines. The price of their ticket was deducted from their future wages, so they were in debt from the moment they arrived. And if they wanted to leave, too bad.

When they weren’t in the mines, they were put into bunkhouses surrounded by armed guards, which the mining company claimed were necessary in order to protect them from the striking miners.

Things were starting to get ugly. But they were only going to get worse.

On Thursday, August 14, Ivan Kalan and Ivan Stimac, both of Croatian descent, joined up with a group of fellow strikers to visit an outpost of WFM. They heard that there would be strike benefits while they were out of work, and they had yet to receive any. It turned out that the WFM had massively overestimated their resources and couldn’t provide any relief to the striking workers. They would have to get by with what they had.

After learning that they wouldn’t be getting any money, the group turned around to head home. Along the way, Kalan and Stimac decided to hang back and buy soda pops from a local store. By the time they finished their drink, they were eager to get back to Seeberville, a nearby town where they rented rooms in a boarding house. So, they took a familiar shortcut. It would be a horrible mistake.

The two men were almost home when a man ran up to them, waving a billy club and shouting in English. He explained that they were on mine property and as they were strikers, this counted as trespassing. The two Croations spoke very little English and had only the vaguest idea of what he was talking about. The man with the club told them to turn around. The strikers ignored him and kept on walking.

It turned out the man who’d stopped them told his boss what happened, and the boss figured out pretty quickly that it was a communication issue. But that didn’t matter anymore. The Waddell-Mahon detectives were on the case, which meant justice was not going to be served.

Six strikebreakers arrived at the boarding house to find the dangerous criminals playing lawn bowling in the side yard. They hopped the fence and a fistfight broke out between the residents and the strikebreakers. This prompted the landlord’s brother, Steven Putrich, to step outside and see what was going on. In the chaos, a strikebreaker fired his gun. Putrich was shot in the stomach. He died shortly after.

After this first shot, the strikebreakers fired at random into the boarding house. Multiple people were injured and one of the tenants, Alois Tijan, was killed. Kalan and Stimac were eventually arrested, but the use of force was so egregious that no one could ignore it. All six strikebreakers would eventually be charged with murder.

The striking miners were outraged by the affair. The funeral procession for the victims became a massive event, complete with Big Annie leading the procession of five thousand mourners. It was an unmistakable show of striker solidarity.

But things were not going to get better. On Labor Day, ironically enough, a fourteen-year-old girl was shot in the head during the strike parade. Miraculously, she lived.

On another occasion, the National Guard tried to block the strikers from occupying a public street. When Big Annie plowed on anyway, a mounted guardsman drew his sabre and knocked the American flag out her hands, ripping the fabric and cutting her finger. The flag fell into the mud and was trampled by the horse’s hooves.

Annie snatched up the fallen flag and held it to her chest. The soldiers tried to grab it from her, but she would not let go. She said, “Run your bayonets and sabres through this flag and kill me, but I won’t move. If this flag will not protect me, then I will die with it.”

Eventually, the soldiers had to give up. Big Annie had won the day.

The fall slowly became the winter, and the mining company refused to budge. Things were becoming desperate for the miners. They hadn’t seen a paycheck since summer. The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company was serving eviction notices. Local grocery stores no longer wanted to accept credit.

With such a dire situation, many of the strikers began looking for another job. Henry Ford’s factory in Detroit offered a starting salary of $5.00 a day, even more than what they would earn if the strike was successful. Soon, the trickle of people leaving Calumet became a flood. It seemed like the situation in Copper Country was deadlocked.

Little did they know, this was far from over. The mining company still had one more card to play, and it had the potential to bring everything down.

It was called the Citizens Alliance. In theory, it was a grassroots organization opposed to unions, socialism, and the disorder that comes from strikes. In reality, they were a pressure group created by and paid for by the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company.

Their main activity was holding rallies. This included live music, speeches, and an open bar. In order to get in, attendants had to become official members of the Citizens Alliance. This had two requirements: sign a paper declaring that the Western Federation of Miners had to go, and wear a white button with the name of the group.

It was an immediate hit. In December alone, over eight thousand people joined. However, the number of people who came just for the booze will forever be a mystery.

But while the Citizens Alliance claimed to be on the side of law and order, the free alcohol wasn’t helping either. It wasn’t uncommon for intoxicated men to leave a rally fired up and ready to cause chaos. This energy was channeled into smashing up union halls or other buildings associated with the strike. And if the strikers had dared to call the police over the property damage, they probably would have gotten more Waddell-Mahon detectives.

The WFM realized they were no closer to negotiating a deal in December than they’d been in June. In fact, the mines were creeping back into production with the help of the hurriedly shipped immigrants. It was slowly dawning on everyone that the strike might actually lose. Everyone had gone through all this suffering…for nothing.

On December 7th, shots rang out at a boarding house in nearby Painsdale known to house Cornish mining bosses. Unlike every other ethnic group, the “cousin jacks” had refused to join the union and continued to work in the mine. Two men, the Huhta Brothers, fired into the house at random, just like the earlier incident at the Croatian boarding house. Three Cornish immigrants were killed: the Jane brothers who had recently arrived from Canada and the landlord, Thomas Dally.

Their deaths finally made the chaos and disorder the Citizens Alliance had claimed was already happening into an undisputed reality. Anger ricocheted through the community. Not even the arrest of the Huhta Brothers could calm the storm.

Copper Country had been on a collision course with disaster for months. But as the calendar turned toward Christmas, that train was now impossible to turn around.

Christmas, 1913

Like the road to hell, the path to the Italian Hall Disaster was laid with good intentions. Big Annie had recently taken over the Women’s Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners, and she knew all too well that the financial situation in Calumet meant Christmas would be grim. She couldn’t take all their cares away, but she and the other women could make sure that the children of the striking miners had a happy Christmas.

The Women’s Auxiliary decided to host a Christmas Eve party. It wouldn’t be fancy, but there would be a Christmas tree, caroling, a Mother Goose play, and a chance to meet Santa Claus. Every child would receive a small present, such as a pair of mittens, a scarf, a small bag of candy, or a piece of fruit.

The venue they chose was the Italian Hall, which was owned and operated by the Societa Mutua Beneficenza Italiana. They were an aid organization that supported recent Italian immigrants. But they also had a large building with an event space that was available for rent. In America today, this would be similar to booking a room at a VFW or a Knights of Columbus building.

The Italian Hall had two floors. The bottom level had a store on one side and a saloon on the other. The second level was the event space. This included a large room with a stage at one end, folding chairs, and a small kitchen. Guests entered via the main entrance and almost immediately climbed a tall, steep staircase directly in front of the door. No one found this floor plan to be a problem until after the disaster.

The party officially started at two, but guests began arriving around noon and the party was in full swing by four o’clock. As many as 700 people were crammed into the event hall, the children outnumbering the adults ten to one. The noise of the holiday music and excited young voices was nearly deafening.

One person in attendance was Mary Coscalla. She was not a member of the WFA and didn’t feel strongly one way or the other about the strike. But her daughter wanted to go to the party, so her brother-in-law asked if she could bring his three children along, too. She agreed, and her brother-in-law gave her his union card. She showed it at the entrance of the Italian Hall and she and the children were allowed inside.

Mrs. Coscalla was standing with her neighbors at the front of the stage when someone stepped inside. She later described him as a “broad fellow” with a dark mustache, wearing a cap, a high collar, and an overcoat. There was the unmistakable white circle of a button pin, but she was too far away to read any text.

And then, the man shouted, “Fire!”

He said it in English, and almost everyone in the room was an immigrant. Those who were multilingual translated the message, and soon the hall was alive with shouting in Finnish, Croatian, Italian and more.

The man shouted again. “Fire!”

According to Mrs. Coscalla, the man raised his arms, as if inviting them to run toward him, toward the door. Then, he vanished behind the surge of people.

Big Annie and the other auxiliary women tried to calm the crowd. There was no smell of smoke, and no indication that they needed to evacuate. And even if there was, panicking was only going to make things worse. They needed everyone to stop screaming and calm down. But it was hopeless. Everyone was screaming, and the situation was already out of control.

As the mass of people moved toward the exit, children were helplessly swept into the motion. The crowd funneled through the door and into the narrow hall that led to the stairs. A wall blocked their view of the exit, so no one knew what was happening until it was too late.

It started with a simple trip on the stairs. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the staircase was so packed that others lost their balance as well. A crowd of people, most of them children, tumbled to the bottom of the stairs. Those behind them were unable to stop or turn around, because the force of the people behind them was too great.

They fell on top of the initial children, crushing them under their body weight. And still more people came, adding more bodies to the pile. The door had completely disappeared under the mass of humanity, trapping everyone still inside the hall.

The few people who had managed to get out before the crisis ran to a fire call box. Within minutes, sirens were racing toward the Italian Hall. They were only a block away, but they were already too late. Approximately one hundred people were entangled on the staircase, some still alive, some already dead.

The firemen threw open the door, but the bodies were piled too high and the weight of those on top was too heavy. They needed to get inside the building and rescue people one by one from the top of the stairs.

So, they made their way up a fire escape that those in the hall had been too panicked to remember existed. Then, they began the arduous and heartbreaking task of pulling the victims out of the pile.

When everyone had been accounted for, seventy-three bodies were laid out in a makeshift morgue. Fifty-nine were children. Fifty of the dead were Finnish, thirteen Croatian, seven Slovenian, and three Italian. No one had been prepared for such a disaster, especially not one so close to Christmas. A call went out to nearby towns for child-sized coffins.

It was a grim Christmas in Copper Country that year. Families woke up the next morning to find their family incomplete, the loss as sharp and unrelenting as a pulled tooth. The Women’s Auxiliary of the Citizens Alliance went from house to house, offering money to those who’d lost family members. They were unilaterally turned down. The union, the families said, would bury its own dead.

Three days later, a mass funeral was held on December 28th. Four churches of different faiths held simultaneous services before a procession moved to the local Lake View Cemetery. The miners had dug three large trench graves for the victims to be lowered into. Photos of the heartbreaking ceremony were published in newspapers nationwide.

With their children laid to rest, the town of Calumet began to wonder: was this a terrible accident? Or was this…murder?

Investigation

Charles Moyer was pretty sure he had the answer. As the president of the WFM, he’d been informed of the events at Italian Hall. He wasn’t sure if the reports of the Citizen’s Alliance button on the man’s jacket were credible, but he did know one thing: the Italian Hall disaster needed to be thoroughly investigated. And he was just the person to make sure that happened.

Moyer spent Christmas Eve at the Hotel Scott in the nearby town of Hancock, writing telegrams to anyone who might listen to him. His list included the Governor of Michigan, Senators, Congressman, the President of the United States, and anyone else with authority. He didn’t accuse anyone of a crime or even state that one had been committed. He merely wanted to make sure that an outside party looked into what had happened.

There was a knock on the hotel room door. Moyer was not expecting any visitors. Someone else might have assumed it was Christmas carolers, but Moyer likely knew better.

It was the County Sheriff, surrounded by local dignitaries. They had heard about his telegrams and they wanted him to stop bringing attention to the Italian Hall Disaster. They also wanted him to make a statement that the Citizens Alliance had nothing to do with the terrible accident. Predictably, Moyer refused.

At this point, the sheriff said he would no longer be able to protect him. The group left the hotel room in silence.

Moyer wasted no time and got straight back to work, picking up the phone to make another call. Charles H. Tanner, the auditor for the WFM, was facing the door when a mob spilled into the room, white Citizens Alliance pins gleaming on their coats. It had only been minutes since the sheriff left.

Moyer turned around and saw that Tanner was held at gunpoint. Then, two men seized him from behind.

There was a violent struggle as Moyer tried to break free. Someone smacked him across the back of the head with a pistol, accidentally causing it to fire. A bullet lodged in his back, enough to cause pain but not enough to kill. Woozy and subdued, the group dragged Moyer and Tanner out of the hotel and into the cold December street. Moyer remembered shouts of “Shoot him!” and “Lynch him!”

When they crossed the Houghton Hancock Bridge, the mob shoved Moyer against the railing, threatening to throw him over the edge and into the freezing water. Then, kicking and cursing the whole way, they dragged him to the train station. They explained that if the two men ever came back to Calumet, they would be killed. With one final shove, Moyer and Tanner were forced onto a train heading to Chicago.

Oddly enough, getting shot and dangled over a bridge by the Citizens Alliance did not convince Moyer of their innocence. Shortly after the train reached Chicago, Moyer gave a press conference from a hospital bed. He vowed to return to Copper Country as soon as he could.

Meanwhile, in Calumet, a Coroner’s Inquest was underway. Unlike previous investigations, interpreters were not offered to the witnesses. All questions were asked in English, and answers had to be in English, too. That meant that the available testimony was extremely limited, since just about everybody in the Italian Hall had been a non-English speaker. Even if it wasn’t the intention, it certainly looked like the inquest had something to hide.

Ultimately, the coroner refused to rule on a cause of death for the victims of the Italian Hall Disaster. The question of whether it was an accident or homicide still hung in the air around Copper Country.

In early 1914, Charles Moyer got his wish. A subcommittee from the U.S. House of Representatives was dispatched to the Keweenaw Peninsula to get a complete testimony of what happened at the Italian Hall Disaster, interpreters included.

Of the seventy witnesses who testified, eighteen said they heard someone shout. “Fire!” Of those, nine said they actually saw the man who sounded the alarm. And six of the nine testified that he was wearing a white button believed to be the insignia of the Citizens Alliance. It was substantial proof. Unfortunately, it didn’t go anywhere.

The newly created U.S. Department of Labor wrote a detailed report of the strike that is still available today. However, they could find no evidence that a crime had been committed. Once again, the case was dropped.

The spring of 1914 brought little comfort to the miners. In addition to the stalled investigations, they were still on strike. But the loss of the children seemed to break what little resolve the people had left. Unwilling to live with the ghosts of the Italian Hall Disaster, hundreds of people moved south to Detroit.

One of those who left was Big Annie. By the time of the disaster, her marriage was falling apart. She got divorced and started a romance with a reporter, Fran Shavs, who’d come to Calumet to cover the strike for a Slovenian-language newspaper in Chicago. Annie left the Copper Country to join him in the big city, where they were married. The couple would eventually have a daughter named Darwina.

Those who remained no longer had the strength to fight. When Charles Moyer fulfilled his promise and returned to Calumet, he realized the situation was hopeless. On April 13th, 1914, the Western Federation of Miners called an end to the strike. The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company had won.

About half of the previous workforce returned to their jobs, but with the condition that they hand in their union cards. They also had to sign a letter to the mine’s general manager, thanking him for breaking the strike and saving them from the villainous Western Federation of Miners. They also had to contribute five cents to buy him a nice watch.

And with that, life in the Copper Country returned to something resembling normal. But the good old days were long behind them. There was still less copper in the ground than there’d been fifty years ago, and no amount of strikebreaking could change that.

The mine limped along through the Great Depression and World War II, expanding into other minerals to keep afloat. The town fell into disrepair, workers left, and soon the great copper mines of the early twentieth century became a memory. The Italian Hall Disaster, for all its horror, was largely forgotten.

Legacy

To this day, no one knows who shouted fire. Without knowing his identity, it is impossible to guess at his motives. Could it have been an honest mistake? Maybe. Fires were common in the beginning of the twentieth century. That’s why the crowd panicked in the first place. It was a reasonable thing to fear.

But if the eyewitnesses are correct and he was wearing a Citizens Alliance pin, then the motive becomes more sinister. Perhaps he was one to those fired-up people who’d smashed union halls and thought it would be funny to cause a panic. Or maybe the Citizens Alliance wanted to ruin the Christmas Party and knew a call of fire would shut it down. But could the man really have predicted that all those children would be crushed to death on the staircase? It’s impossible to know.

Over the years, rumors circulated about the Italian Hall Disaster. Some speculated that the man couldn’t have been a Citizens Alliance member, because union cards were checked at the entrance to the party. This is easily debunked. Although cards had been diligently checked at the beginning of the party, the Auxiliary had long since abandoned it by the time of the disaster. Multiple patrons of the downstairs saloon reported that they’d wandered in without anyone noticing.

Another rumor was that the doors of the hall opened inward. Today, this is a huge fire code violation. Outward-facing exit doors are required because it prevents incidents like the Italian Hall Disaster from happening, ensuring that people are not crushed while trying to leave a building. This rumor was so persistent that it was even included on the site’s historical marker before being removed.

But the sad truth is that eyewitnesses and building blueprints show that the doors opened outwards. The tragedy had not happened because of the doors, but despite them.

This, perhaps, led to the most vicious rumor of all. Somewhere along the line, the story morphed from a lone Citizens Alliance member causing panic to a full-on conspiracy to kill the miners’ children. In this version, the man was sent in to shout “Fire!” while his buddies stationed themselves at the exits, holding the doors closed. If true, this would undisputedly count as murder.

But there is no evidence to suggest this happened. Multiple people were able to get out before the disaster occurred, one of whom called the fire department. Even if the initial panic was caused on purpose, the deaths were ultimately an unfortunate accident caused by someone tripping on the stairs.

Ultimately, the Italian Hall Disaster was a tragedy. And if the Citizens Alliance was responsible for shouting fire, they did a good job covering their tracks. Both the inquest and the Congressional investigation found nothing. No one was willing to give up the person who shouted fire.

Perhaps it was this unsatisfactory ending that let the Italian Hall Disaster fade from public consciousness. But in 1945, the event found a second wind.

American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie was an unapologetic socialist and a major voice in folk music. His most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” was written as a populist response to “God Bless America.” He frequently performed with “This Machine Kills Fascists” written across his guitar. And when he heard about the Italian Hall Disaster, he wanted to create a song to memorialize it.

There are factual inaccuracies in his song, including the fact the strikebreakers did not hold the doors shut. But it also includes references to real events, such as Big Annie trying to calm the crowd. The song was never one of his most popular, but it remains the best-known interpretation of the tragedy.

Conclusion

And Woody Guthrie was undeniably right about one thing: the Italian Hall Disaster is a story about greed. On one side was the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, greedy for profits and shareholder dividends. On the other side were the miners, greedy for higher wages and an eight-hour workday.

Many people have argued that one side was more just than the other, but ultimately, that doesn’t matter. The conflict led to the deaths of seventy-three people. The images of the children, laid out in the makeshift morgue, the tiny coffins laid out for burial, will be with us forever. They are the ones who paid the price.

And so, to quote Woody Guthrie’s song “1913 Massacre”: “The parents, they cried, and the miners, they moaned, ‘see what your greed for money has done’.”

Key Takeaways

• The Italian Hall Disaster of 1913 resulted in 73 deaths, mostly children, due to a false fire alarm.
• The event occurred during a bitter mining strike in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, involving ethnic tensions and labor disputes.
• The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company hired detective agencies and the National Guard to break the strike.
• A Christmas Eve party organized by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners ended tragically.
• Investigations into the disaster were inconclusive, and the identity of the man who shouted ‘Fire!’ remains unknown.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened at the Italian Hall Disaster?

On December 24th, 1913, a man shouted ‘Fire!’ at a crowded Christmas party in the Italian Hall, causing a panic that led to the deaths of 73 people, most of them children.

Why was the Italian Hall Disaster significant?

The disaster involved striking miners, hired thugs, the American Dream, a congressional investigation, and a song from singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, highlighting the tensions and tragedies of the labor movement in the early 20th century.

What was the role of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company in the Italian Hall Disaster?

The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company was involved in a long and bitter mining strike that left the town desperate for Christmas cheer. The company’s actions and the tensions they created contributed to the tragic events of the Italian Hall Disaster.

Who was Charles H. Moyer and what was his involvement in the Italian Hall Disaster?

Charles H. Moyer was the president of the Western Federation of Miners. He was involved in organizing the strike and was a key figure in calling for an investigation into the Italian Hall Disaster.

What was the Citizens Alliance and their role in the Italian Hall Disaster?

The Citizens Alliance was a pressure group created by and paid for by the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. They were opposed to unions and strikes, and their actions, including holding rallies and causing chaos, contributed to the tensions leading up to the Italian Hall Disaster.

What was the outcome of the investigations into the Italian Hall Disaster?

Despite eyewitness accounts and substantial proof, the investigations, including a Coroner’s Inquest and a congressional investigation, found no evidence of a crime, and the case was ultimately dropped.

How did the Italian Hall Disaster affect the mining strike?

The disaster seemed to break the resolve of the striking miners. Many moved away, and the strike was called off in April 1914, with the miners returning to work under the conditions set by the mining company.

What was the legacy of the Italian Hall Disaster?

The Italian Hall Disaster is remembered as a tragic event that highlighted the greed and conflicts of the labor movement. It inspired a song by Woody Guthrie and remains a poignant reminder of the human cost of industrial disputes.

What were the working conditions like in the copper mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula?

The working conditions in the copper mines were dangerous and exhausting. Miners worked long hours in hazardous conditions, with accidents being common. The introduction of the one-man drill further increased tensions and safety concerns.

What was the role of the Women’s Auxiliary in the Italian Hall Disaster?

The Women’s Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners organized the Christmas Eve party at the Italian Hall to provide a happy Christmas for the children of the striking miners. Their efforts were tragically interrupted by the disaster.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: The Tragedy That Silenced a Small Michigan Town
• Hero image source by Antony-22 / openverse, by-sa.

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