The missoula free speech fight. So in the fall of, 1909, this woman pictured here, Elizabeth Gurley flynn, made her way to missoula to organize laborers. She was very young, 19 years old, as old, as some of you guys are, maybe even a little bit younger than some of you are. But she and several people were there to organize laborers, and specifically lumber workers in the missoula area. But the outcome of her visit there was not just a battle over rights and working conditions, but ultimately a battle over free speech. The rights to free speech, the right to speak freely in public, to assemble in public without being harassed or arrested or jailed. So in this, were going to were going to get into the details of what actually happened in missoula. But i also want to start out a little more broadly talk about the context of this period and whats leading up to this battle, whats shaping it, and then in the aftermath, talk a little about what happened to some of these people that were involved in this free speech battle. What happened to some of the questions around, free speech and a little bit broadly the significance of this missoula is free speech battle. All right. So this is aeriod of intense rapid, massi for the United States. This from the late 19th to early 20th ctury. Its period when you have the rise of these industrial people like andre carnegie, John D Rockefeller and others. Its when the United States goes from having some industry to being the world leader in industrial output, producing much more than other countries. Its a period when industrialized is moving to making on a much larger scale, much bigger businesses, huge corporations, building things with new technology, developing ways to produce things more efficiently and more cheaply. And this produces a lot of changes in. The American Society in this period. There are it produces a great amount of wealth, produces a lot of different technologies, new technologies that benefit people it raises standards living, but it also produces some problems or some issues theres a lot of poverty that despite a great deal of wealth in period, theres a tremendous amount inequality that comes out of this period. There are changes to working conditions. How long need to work, what hours they work, and a of more Hazardous Conditions under which they work. And so theres lots of questions that come out about like Corporate Power, the power of corporations having the marketplace as well as in politics. But the biggest question question is whats called the labor question, the question of what rights or powers will laborers have in this new industrial society. This is a picture here of part Andrew Carnegies steelworks. So the outcome of this is one the outcomes of this anyways of period of industrialization and some of its problems is great tensions, labor and class to the extent that some of these tensions lead to violence its two outbreaks of violence that fact look a lot like literally war. This is a series of panels might on first blush look like some panels from the civil war or Something Like that. But this is actually a strike at the homestead works, which is one of Andrew Carnegie steelworks in pennsylvania, where in after a strike and e attempt by employers to bring in nonunion laborers there was conflict there violence the state militia was sent in well as the Company Hiring pinkerton which were private a private police force to try to get over, you know the obstacles presented by striking workers. This is another here that gives you some sense of this. The early 1900s in the gold mines, gold fields of colo which shifted away from the sort of old, you know, gold pan going oue on his own to a much more industrial scale of mining. The strikers,orkers there also went on again, leading to ultimately a lot of ce. The sending in of the state militia. And you can see them pictured technologiesively newnew technologies of this period, which is the machine gun. So a lot of this looks is very, very violent and looks really like warfare, literal class warfare. And we often have, i think a sense of the United States that its a place where class tensions class are not as prominent as in other places. But in this period this period of the late 19th and early 20th century was a period there was intense violence around class and questions of labor. And the United States had some of the most violent labor conflict in the world in this period. Now, theres lots of different questions among laborers about what how theyre going to respond to this new era of industrialization and Corporate Power and so on. Some unions like the American Federation, labor, wt to push for things like higher wages, workers, safer conditions, shorter hours, but that they dont have a longer range plan or a broader goal. Theyre not trying to change society more fundamentally, but other laborers and labor organizations are. They may also be pushing things like better wages, better working conditions, but theyre also pushing for ultimately a fundamentally different system, a change to the system than industrial as it exists for many of them. They see the world like this where you have at the bottom who are producing the wealth. Theyre the ones doing the work, but its the people above them ultimately the capitalts who are most benefiting from that and there are other people in between. Theyre like the military, as you can see, who are keeping the workers in their place. And the organization that is most with these ideas in this period are the Industrial Workers of the world, radical union that wanted to overthrow capitalism and and it was the the major sort of competitor to the American Federation labor, an organization that had a more narrow ideas about what it wanted for workers to so the Industrial Workers of the world this is their logo here and you can see on the right there one of their cartoons or comics that they created that gives you a sense of what theyre interested t path the left is says a fair pay for a fr rk. That was the slogan of the American Federation of labor afl, the Industrial Workers of the world path on the right, the abitn of the wage system and the basic idea behind the iww as ideas was that if they could organize all workers, they could they could throw off the ruling capitalist class and workers would just manage the industries themselves and get all the wealth that they saw as being created for the workers and do away with this wage. Labor system. Yeah. So in the picture, the pyramid of the work system, what does it mean for a we eat for you like what is. Thats a good question. I mean that is im not really sure what that that part of that means those are those look like middle or upper class people. I, i guess there they are. They people that are benefiting off of the backs of laborers. But im not sure why theyre there its phrases we eat for you. Its a good question. So the Industrial Workers, the world are interested in in organizing workers as all workers. All right. So one of the things thats different them in addition to their more radical whole take on society than the American Federation of labor, is that theyre an union. And what that in this period is that you Industrial Union was was contrasted with the craft unions of the American Federation of labor unions would be unions made up of skilled workers in an Industrial Unions would be a union of every worker that industry skilled unskilled. There probably werent really any that were literally unskilled but there were Different Levels of skill right and so this is just part of a very detailed chart the iww created. But just shows you, you know, here under service and lumbering, all of, say, all workers and words in the forest, they divided them up by different industries. And thats how they would organize this broader union. But all of the workers in those industries woulde would be part of that union. And in addition to trying to organize all workers within a union skilled and unskilled, the iww wanted to organize all workers regardless of things like gender or race or ethnicity. Again, was not something that was true. The American Federation of labor, who excluded most africanamerican ones, excluded a lot of women, excluded chinese and other workers, in addition to excluding unskilled. So the iww is interested in organizing all workers. It doesnt matter what race or, what race or whether youre a man or woman. And finally, they wanted organize workers on a global theyre the Industrial Workers the world and ultimately want to organize labor laborers across National Lines as well. Now you can here the industrial worker this is map of actions iww actions from 1905 to 1920, which was kind of the golden age of the iww and. Theyre working all across the United States, but theres they take a lot of actions in the northeast in some of the Manufacturing Industries there. But a lot of their work is located in the west and in many they come out of the west. The iwd ws founded in 1905 in chicago, but the main predecessor organization to them is a union called the western federation of miners. The western federation of miners. The impetus it comes out of another one of these really bloody battles that happens in. The Mining Industry in idaho and as a result of that, miners in the west decide that they need to organize on a much broader scale, build an organization, an Umbrella Organization for all miners in the west, and they meet in montana in 1893 to create the western federation of miners and then the western many members of the western of miners are the key people who, for the organization of an even bigger organization, the industrial of the world in chicago. In 1905. So they come out of the west. But part of the reason that they have a lot of actions in the west and you see a lot in the Pacific Northwest in particular is that a lot of the people that they to organize and a lot of the people that are not organized by other unions are located in the west are workers like workers that work in mines, workers that work in Agricultural Industry and the lumber industry. These and many of these workers are these, quote unquote, unskilled workers that are not being organized by the American Federation of labor. A lot of them work in jobs where theyre very itinerant. They move around a lot to different. Theres jobs that are essentially seasonal or theyre boom and bust style jobs. So they emerge in one area and then that that, you know, that attempt exploit resources in an area ends and they move somewhere else. Those type of workers are hard to organize and many unions dont bother trying to organize them. But the Industrial Workers, the world wants to organize them. Thats why theyre there. Theyre you see a lot of their actions in the west. Yeah. What does the darker red indicate . I think that those are areas where there were there multiple actions there. The actions include things like strikes campaigns, things like that. So i think that those are areas where there were more than one. Yeah. This, by the way, is a theres a university of washington, a whole Interactive Digital history of the Industrial Workers of the world, where you look at things like these interactive maps, look at graphs, all sorts of things about the history of this of the iww over time. So its a really cool resource. Check out all. Ri so were going to talk about montana here, how this relates to montana. So montana is one othe one of these parts of the where the Industrial Workers of the world are very active. And as i mentioned before, butte in montana was where the western federation of miners has created one of these key predecessors to the montanas in the late 19th century and early 20th century is dominated by the copper industry. The copper mines in have emerged in the late 19th century as some of the most profitable and in rich mines in terms of copper the world. And by this period, no other place on earth is producing copper than the copper mines. Butte. But that mining again has to be done on an industrial scale copper is mixed in with all sorts of other materials. Its not as, you know, on a per rate basis as valuable as Something Like gold or silver so you got to mine a lot of it to be able to make a profit and you have to able to smelt that down and ideally not smelt it lo ways away from butte. Its kind of a ways from, you know, a lot of other industrial nters, a lot of places that might make use of copper, but you dont want to ship copper or all the way across the country, you want to be able to smelt it down and purify it first. So the copper mines are in butte are here. You know, butte is a big urban Industrial Center in the west in this period. And just outside of butte, which is anaconda, a town that was actually just created entirely be a sltg center for the coer coming out of butte. And theres different owners of coines and copper in the butte and anaconda area. But the biggest of these that emerges in the early 19th, early 1900s is the aconda Copper Company, one of the very biggest corporations in the world. At the time. So these are huge industrial processing. These these mines that are being built and the smelter is being built to to to to smelt that. But they need among other things, they need want theres a really crucial material to make these things operate and that is would you need a lot of wood to build all these mines in butte . These mines are supported. The mining tunnels the shafts are supported by, huge timbers. And theres the the mines in butte go thousands of feet deep. Theres of miles of mines built in butte. So you can just this is a one miner working on one of these wooden timbers in the shaft. But you can just imagine thousands of miles. That takes a lot of wood right. So to do smelters, the use coal sometimes they also use a lot of wood. Anthis picture on the left here might look at first glance like a field of hay bales, maybe. But if you look a little bit closer in the here, you see thats wood stacked up. This is a forest thats been liquidated and chopped down and stacked into piles for cordwood to feed the smelter at anaconda. So need a tremendous amount of wood for this this industry in montana and where is that going to ce om its going to come from western montana. Thats whl these huge forests are located. And right in the of all those huge forests in western is missoula, which is also one of the places where a lot of travel routes come together, rivers come together. Its a natural place for building a really big mill. Theres all of mills, lumber mills that are built in montana, in the wes period. But the biggest of these is the Big Blackfoot Milling Company built in bonner just outf missoula, itially owned independently and eventually boht in the early 1900s byhe anaconda Copper Company. Because what is so important to their industry, so the workers in this industry, in the lumber and this lumber industry in western montana are the workers that Elizabeth Gurley flynn and other members of the Industrial Workers of the world are going to come and organize in organizing them, because for a few reasons. One is that the work there is very hard. Its very dangerous. The conditions under which workers are very poor in a lot of ways. And just to give you, a sense of what this work looks like. You go out into the woods, got to get all this wood to a mill like the big blackfoot mill, right . So you go out into the woods, youre chopping down these trees, axes or hand saws. Its very difficult work. Then have to skid those logs down and load them on a big wagon or sled thats drawn horses. You can see these are all from the blackfoot drainage, which is where most of that wood came from that went to the blackfoot Big Blackfoot Milling Company. So up around areas like seeley lake and clearwater junction. So they set it down there and then you would take those to riverside and wait often was done in winter because its easier to move logs that way. Then would wait for the spring runoff when the rivers at their highest level and theyre flowing really high and really fast and really cold also. And then you push those logs into the and float them down. And if a worker working on that you float down the river with them, you go down the river with and thats those are on the top there. Workers who are shepherding those logs into the river and then are going to follow them down. So you can imagine going down the river with those those kinds of logs, those logs like that. And you might face thin like massive log jams is a logjam on the Blackfoot River. Just imagine being in the middle of Something Like that and having to deal with it with hand tools or maybe dynamite, which was one of the ways that they used to try to break up some of these logjams. Incredibly and incredibly dangerous work. And ultimately that would those make it down . This is the Blackfoot River here coming out of these mo