The Clifton-Morenci Strike

The Clifton-Morenci Strike PDF Author: James R. Kluger
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816548021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
The strike that paralyzed the mining camps of Clifton and Morenci during 1915–16 and gained nationwide attention was one of the most remarkable that ever occurred in the West. During an era when physical violence, death, and property destruction were almost accepted elements of Western labor difficulties, this walkout was peaceful. With few exceptions, law and order continually predominated. This, then, is the seldom-seen side, a positive side, to a state's labor history. Coming at a time when western labor was purging itself of radicalism and recharting its goals, the Clifton-Morenci strike may well have been that "milestone" in organized labor's groping for recognition in the West. Violence did not erupt—this notable absence of bloodshed thereby making the strike unique in that time of industrial turbulence. Kluger's answer to the question of why and how peace prevailed is significant reading. Strikers and managers hurled charges at each other, but both sides showed restraint when it came to action. When negotiations reached an impasse, Governor George W. P. Hunt moved to prevent the managers from importing strike-breakers. At the same time, the Department of Labor entered the situation, and the rise in copper prices and loss of wages made a settlement desirable for both sides. When the mine whistles blew on January 26, 1916, to signal the end of the strike, the repercussions of the events of 1915 were still to be felt. Author Kluger traces how the strike affected working conditions, wages, and the cause of unionism in the district. Overall, he provides insight into feelings concerning the fears of management regarding unionism, and labor's manner of making itself heard during these years. Western historians, labor historians, and all those concerned with labor relations will recognize the importance of this highly readable work.

The Clifton-Morenci Strike

The Clifton-Morenci Strike PDF Author: James R. Kluger
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816548021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
The strike that paralyzed the mining camps of Clifton and Morenci during 1915–16 and gained nationwide attention was one of the most remarkable that ever occurred in the West. During an era when physical violence, death, and property destruction were almost accepted elements of Western labor difficulties, this walkout was peaceful. With few exceptions, law and order continually predominated. This, then, is the seldom-seen side, a positive side, to a state's labor history. Coming at a time when western labor was purging itself of radicalism and recharting its goals, the Clifton-Morenci strike may well have been that "milestone" in organized labor's groping for recognition in the West. Violence did not erupt—this notable absence of bloodshed thereby making the strike unique in that time of industrial turbulence. Kluger's answer to the question of why and how peace prevailed is significant reading. Strikers and managers hurled charges at each other, but both sides showed restraint when it came to action. When negotiations reached an impasse, Governor George W. P. Hunt moved to prevent the managers from importing strike-breakers. At the same time, the Department of Labor entered the situation, and the rise in copper prices and loss of wages made a settlement desirable for both sides. When the mine whistles blew on January 26, 1916, to signal the end of the strike, the repercussions of the events of 1915 were still to be felt. Author Kluger traces how the strike affected working conditions, wages, and the cause of unionism in the district. Overall, he provides insight into feelings concerning the fears of management regarding unionism, and labor's manner of making itself heard during these years. Western historians, labor historians, and all those concerned with labor relations will recognize the importance of this highly readable work.

Holding the Line

Holding the Line PDF Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801465095
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first non-fiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters. Hundreds of families held the line in the 1983 strike against Phelps Dodge Copper in Arizona. After more than a year the strikers lost their union certification, but the battle permanently altered the social order in these small, predominantly Hispanic mining towns. At the time the strike began, many women said they couldn't leave the house without their husband's permission. Yet, when injunctions barred union men from picketing, their wives and daughters turned out for the daily picket lines. When the strike dragged on and men left to seek jobs elsewhere, women continued to picket, organize support, and defend their rights even when the towns were occupied by the National Guard. "Nothing can ever be the same as it was before," said Diane McCormick of the Morenci Miners Women's Auxiliary. "Look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies."

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction PDF Author: Linda Gordon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674061713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
In 1904, New York nuns brought forty Irish orphans to a remote Arizona mining camp, to be placed with Catholic families. The Catholic families were Mexican, as was the majority of the population. Soon the town's Anglos, furious at this "interracial" transgression, formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction tells this disturbing and dramatic tale to illuminate the creation of racial boundaries along the Mexican border. Clifton/Morenci, Arizona, was a "wild West" boomtown, where the mines and smelters pulled in thousands of Mexican immigrant workers. Racial walls hardened as the mines became big business and whiteness became a marker of superiority. These already volatile race and class relations produced passions that erupted in the "orphan incident." To the Anglos of Clifton/Morenci, placing a white child with a Mexican family was tantamount to child abuse, and they saw their kidnapping as a rescue. Women initiated both sides of this confrontation. Mexican women agreed to take in these orphans, both serving their church and asserting a maternal prerogative; Anglo women believed they had to "save" the orphans, and they organized a vigilante squad to do it. In retelling this nearly forgotten piece of American history, Linda Gordon brilliantly recreates and dissects the tangled intersection of family and racial values, in a gripping story that resonates with today's conflicts over the "best interests of the child."

Copper Crucible

Copper Crucible PDF Author: Jonathan D. Rosenblum
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801485541
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In this second edition of his in-depth and gripping account of the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983, Jonathan D. Rosenblum describes in a new epilogue the resurgence of union activism at Steelworkers Local 890 in Silver City, New Mexico, more than a decade since the devastating campaign waged by the Phelps Dodge Corporation to obliterate the unions at its Arizona properties.

Race and Labor in Western Copper

Race and Labor in Western Copper PDF Author: Philip J. Mellinger
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816547726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This is the story of immigrant copper workers and their attempts to organize at the turn of the century in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and El Paso, Texas. These Mexican and European laborers of widely varying backgrounds and languages had little social, economic, or political power. Yet they achieved some surprising successes in their struggles—all in the face of a racist society and the unbridled power of the mine owners. Mellinger's book is the first regional history of these ordinary working people—miners, muckers, millhands, and smelter workers—who labored in the thousands of mountain and desert mining camps across the western heartland early in this century. These men, largely uneducated, frequently moving from camp to camp, subjected to harsh and dangerous conditions, often poorly paid, nevertheless came together for a common purpose. They came from Mexico, from the U.S. Hispanic Southwest, and from several European countries, especially from Greece, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and Spain. They were far from a homogeneous group. Yet, in part because they set aside ethnic differences to pursue cooperative labor action, they were able to make demands, plan strikes, carry them out, and sometimes actually win. They also won the aid of the Western Federation of Miners and the more radical Industrial Workers of the World. After initial rejection, they were eventually accepted by mainstream unionists. Mellinger discusses towns, mines, camps, companies, and labor unions, but this book is largely about people. In order to reconstruct their mining-community lives, he has used little-known union and company records, personal interviews with old-time workers and their families, and a variety of regional sources that together have enabled him to reveal a complex and significant pattern of social, economic, and political change in the American West.

The Morenci Marines

The Morenci Marines PDF Author: Kyle Longley
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700621105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In 1966, nine young men left the Arizona desert mining camp of Morenci to serve their country in the far-flung jungles of Vietnam, in danger zones from Hue to Khe Sanh. Ultimately, only three survived. Each battled survivor’s guilt, difficult re-entries into civilian life, and traumas from personally experiencing war—and losing close friends along the way. Such stories recurred throughout America, but the Morenci Marines stood out. ABC News and Time magazine recounted their moving tale during the war, and, in 2007, the Arizona Republic selected the “Morenci Nine” as the most important veterans’ story in state history. Returning to the soldiers’ Morenci roots, Kyle Longley’s account presents their story as unique by setting and circumstance, yet typical of the sacrifices borne by small towns all across America. His narrative spotlights a generation of young people who joined the military during the tumultuous 1960s and informs a later generation of the hard choices made, many with long-term consequences. The story of the Morenci Marines also reflects that of their hometown: a company town dominated by the Phelps Dodge Mining Corporation, where the company controlled lives and the labor strife was legendary. The town’s patriotic citizens saw Vietnam as a just cause, moving Clive Garcia’s mother to say, “He died for this cause of freedom.” Yet while their sons fought and sent home their paychecks, Phelps Dodge sought to destroy the union that kept families afloat, pushing the government to end a strike that it said undermined the war effort. Morenci was also a place where cultures intermingled, and the nine friends included three Mexican Americans and one Native American. Longley reveals how their backgrounds affected their decisions to join and also helped the survivors cope, with Mike Cranford racing his Harley on back roads at high speeds while Joe Sorrelman tried to deal with demons of war through Navajo rituals. Drawing on personal interviews and correspondence that sheds new light on the Morenci Nine, Longley has written a book as much about loss, grief, and guilt as about the battlefield. It makes compelling reading for anyone who lived in that era—and for anyone still seeing family members go off to fight in controversial wars.

The American West

The American West PDF Author: Walter Nugent
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253212900
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The American West has generated exceptional attention in the past few years, and new scholarship and interpretations have enriched and enlivened the study of its history. Each of the seventeen exciting and provocative essays chosen for this book illuminates an important topic in Western history. Three opening essays by the editors define the West as frontier and region, and place American frontiers in comparative context. Then follow essays that consider women's property rights in Spanish-Mexican California; the mountain men and national identity; Indians and bison on the Great Plains in the early nineteenth century; the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848; the Latter-day Saints from 1830 to 1890; the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 as a case of Indian-white conflict; cowboys as wage workers in the 1880s; homesteading and the homesteading ideal; miners and ethnic conflict in early-twentieth-century Arizona; the Great Depression in Idaho; how World War II changed Los Angeles; Japanese-American women in World War II; African Americans in the West; and the Pacific Northwest since 1945. The editors also provide a general introduction to the study of Western history and a time line of important events.

Politics, Labor, and the War on Big Business

Politics, Labor, and the War on Big Business PDF Author: David R. Berman
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607321823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Politics, Labor, and the War on Big Business details the rise, fall, and impact of the anticorporate reform effort in Arizona during the Progressive reform era, roughly 1890-1920. Drawing on previously unexamined archival files and building on research presented in his previous books, author David R. Berman offers a fresh look at Progressive heritage and the history of industrial relations during Arizona's formative period. In the 1890s, once-heavily courted corporations had become, in the eyes of many, outside "money interests" or "beasts" that exploited the wealth of the sparsely settled area. Arizona's anticorporate reformers condemned the giant corporations for mistreating workers, farmers, ranchers, and small-business people and for corrupting the political system. During a thirty-year struggle, Arizona reformers called for changes to ward off corporate control of the political system, increase corporate taxation and regulation, and protect and promote the interests of working people. Led by George W.P. Hunt and progressive Democrats, Arizona's brand of Progressivism was heavily influenced by organized labor, third parties, and Socialist activists. As highly powerful railroad and mining corporations retaliated, conflict took place on both political levels and industrial backgrounds, sometimes in violent form. Politics, Labor and the War on Big Business places Arizona's experience in the larger historical discussion of reform activity of the period, considering issues involving the role of government in the economy and the possibility of reform, topics highly relevant to current debates.

International Horseshoers' Monthly Magazine

International Horseshoers' Monthly Magazine PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Blacksmithing
Languages : en
Pages : 1206

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Book Description


Workers' Health, Workers' Democracy

Workers' Health, Workers' Democracy PDF Author: Alan Derickson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501745697
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The most dangerous work in North America at the turn of the century may have been extracting metal-bearing ore from mountains of hard rock. Beginning in the 1890s miners in the West worked through local unions both to prevent occupational hazards and to assure themselves of adequate health care. Among other projects, they planned, built, and governed more than twenty general hospitals throughout the Western United States and Canada. Workers' Health, Workers' Democracy is an engaging and richly documented account of this first attempt to create a democratically controlled health care system in North America. Focusing on the efforts of local unions, Derickson illuminates the broader history of the Western labor movement, the self-help traditions of rank-and-file workers, and the evolution of health care on the industrial frontier.