Happy Saturday. Today's classic is the Bisbee Deportation, and it has ties to a couple of recent episodes. One is The Great Stork Derby. In that episode, we talked about how racism and anti immigrant attitudes were part of the news coverage of the derby. Although the Stork Derby took place in Canada and the Bisbee Deportation was in the United States, a lot of the context surrounding those attitudes is the same. We talked about that context a lot in this episode, and in our recent episode on Lucy Parsons, we discussed her being part of the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, but we didn't talk that much about the Wobblies as an organization. This episode does. Though. This episode also has one of the more embarrassing errors we've made on the show, and we're sharing it again in spite of that. When writing this episode, I typed international when I met industrial, and not only did I do that, I did it more than once. So anytime you hear one of us say international Workers of the World, which is both incorrect and redundant, just mentally correct that first word to industrial in your mind. This episode originally came out on May SWO. We hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Jay. We are going to talk about the Bisbee deportation. This is a v incident that has elements of a labor strike and a wartime hysteria, and a vigilante mob and a mass propaganda effort, and that's all rolled into one. It took place in Bisbee, Arizona, which is southeast of Tucson and close to the United States border with Mexico, and it was part of a series of labor disputes in Arizona's mining industry during World War One that led to a loss of about a hundred million pounds of copper. It was also part of an ongoing series of deportations and arrests and even murders that targeted members of the International Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. There was a lot going on here. As I got into this this podcast outline, I began wishing that we had already done episodes on a number of people and organizations and events in it, because that would have been helpful. But sadly we do not already have episodes on the Wobblies and the entire mining industry of Arizona, etcetera. Well, this is the start, and then you never know where we'll go from here. The city of Bisbee dates back to the Apache Wars, which were an ongoing series of armed conflicts between the United States and various Apache tribes and nation in the American Southwest. In eighteen seventy seven, the U. S. Army was searching the mountains of Arizona Territory for hostile groups of Apache. A civilian tracker who was working with them spotted signs of minerals, which led to the area's first mining claim. Bisbee grew rapidly from there thanks to the presence of lead, silver, gold, and especially copper. By the turn of the twentieth century, more than twenty thousand people lived in Bisbee and the communities immediately adjacent to it. Three companies had mines in the immediate area, and together these mines employed about five thousand people. By far, the largest of these companies was Phelps Dodge, which produced sixty three percent of the region's copper and owned the area's most productive mine, which was the Copper Queen. Shattick. Dean Mining Company and the Calumet and Arizona Mine ran much smaller mining operations in the area as well. Phelps Dodge also owned a lot the town, including the hospital, the newspaper, the only department store, and the library. The town's y m c A and y w c A had been established at the behest of James Douglas, who was president of the Copper Queen Mine. There were also businesses that weren't owned by or affiliated with Phelps Dodge, but they all knew that they had to stay on the company's good side to remain afloat. So this starts to sound like a really stereotypical company town, and a lot of ways it was, but it wasn't quite as exploitive as most of the company towns that have come up on the show before. The mining companies did plan out the neighborhoods, and they segregated the workforce by race and ethnicity in those neighborhoods, but a lot of people living there actually owned their homes. Phelps Dodge ran a company store, but overall its prices were comparable with other normal stores. It wasn't a case of the company paying miners in script that could only be used at the company store and then inflating the prices there so much that there workers were always in debt to the company. So none of this, though, was because Phelps, Dodge or the rest of the mining companies were particularly benevolent. It was because they wanted to attract men with families to work in the mines with the hope of reducing turnover and the in their labor force. The idea was that if men brought their families to this nice place to live that had lots of amenities, then they wouldn't have to keep retraining and finding new workers. I mean, it's all a business decision. So overall, Bisbee had a reputation as a pretty good place to live and work, especially for white miners. It had long had a reputation as a quote white man's camp. At first, that had meant that Chinese workers were excluded, but it gradually shifted to mean that the white miners got the most desirable and highest paying jobs. The pay overall was towards the top end of the range for the industry, and all those amenities that Phelps Dodge was paying for didn't always exist in other mining towns and camps. But at the same time, the situation was tense and Bisbee. In nineteen seventeen, Bisbee was very close to the border with Mexico, where the Mexican Revolution had started in nineteen ten and was still ongoing. In addition to the war going on just across the border, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa had attacked Columbus, New Mexico, which was roughly two hundred miles or three d twenty one kilometers away, on March nine of nineteen sixteen. Nineteen people had been killed and much of Columbus burned to the ground, and other communities near the border were afraid that something similar might happen to them. World War One added another layer to this fear. In January of nineteen seventeen, British cryptographers deciphered a telegram from German foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman which promised that Germany would return Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to Mexico if Mexico joined the war on the side of Germany. These states had all previously been a part of Mexico and Texas had declared its independence from Mexico in eighteen thirty six, and the territory that would become Arizona and New Mexico, along with most of the rest of the American West and Southwest, was ceded to the United States in eighteen forty eight, at the end of the Mexican American War. Britain presented this telegram, known as the Zimmerman Telegram, to the United States on February, and by March it had been printed in newspapers. Wasn't very long after that that the United States actually entered the war. So now, on top of being worried that the Mexican Revolution might spill over into the United States, people living near the border were worried that Mexico would wind up and would wind up as allies of Germany and attack the United States directly. And yet another source of tension in Bisbee in nineteen seventeen was a general nationwide trend towards xenophobia and nativism. On February five, Congress passed the Immigration Act of nineteen seventeen, overriding a veto by President Woodrow will Wilson. We haven't talked about this particular piece of legislation on the show before because most of the time it was superseded by other laws that were more relevant to the subject at hand, but at the time it was the strictest immigration law the country had seen. Before the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two, the United States had no federal laws restricting immigration. If you could get here, you could stay. The Immigration Act of nineteen seventeen built on the Chinese Exclusion Act, along with other immigration laws and practices that had been put in place in the intervening years. Section three of the nineteen seventeen legislation included a colossally long list of people who were excluded from admission into the United States, including, as a few excerpts, quote idiots, imbeciles, and feeble minded persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority, poppers, professional beggars, and vagrants, anarchists, con tracked, laborers, and people whose passage was paid for by someone else. The act also established what was known as the Asiatic Exclusion Zone, which barred immigrants from most Eastern Asia and Pacific islands. It mandated a literacy test as well, along with attacks of eight dollars per person for adult immigrants, which is equivalent to roughly a hundred and sixty dollars today. This legislation was heavily influenced by the eugenics movement and the idea that the United States should only allow people with so called good stock into the country. This was happening at the same time that Henry H. Goddard was studying the people who arrived at Ellis Island hoping to immigrate to the United States. We talked about that work in our episode called the Calicacs and the Eugenicists. He published work from this research that claimed that forty percent of immigrants were so called feeble minded, including eighty three percent of Jews, seventy of Italians, eighty percent of Hungarians, and eighty seven percent of Russians. This nineteen seventeen legislation gives you a pretty good idea of how the country was feeling about immigration, but it wasn't really all that successful at reducing the number of quote undesirable immigrants or immigrants from undesirable countries. In ninety four, it would be replaced by another law known as the Johnson Read Act, which was also inspired by the eugenics movement with a goal of limiting immigration from southern and Eastern Europe, and workers from those countries were a significant part of the labor pool in Bisbee. All of this, the minds, the war, and the rising tide of anti immigrant sentiment fed into the Bisbee deportation. And we have not even gotten to the presence of the Wobblies yet, who were described as anything from a menace to quote, the waste material of creation which should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion. We will talk about the Wobblies and who they were and why everyone hated them so much after a sponsor break. By seventeen, there were two major unions representing miners in Bisbee, Arizona, and those two organizations were really tangled up in one another's histories. One was the International Union of Mine Mill and Smelter Workers, also known as mine Mill which had previously been known as the Western Federation of Miners or WFM. The WFM had been established in eightee and had become known for radical and sometimes violent tactics and also for violent retaliation against the union's activities. The other was the Industrial Workers of the World or i W. W also known as the Wobbly E's. The i w W was founded in nineteen o five, and one of its founders was William Haywood, known as Big Bill, formerly of the WFM. Many of the w FM's most radical members moved over to the i w W, and by nineteen o seven, the Western Federation of Miners had denounced the International Workers of the World. Concerned that the IWW's focus on revolution was overshadowing its focus on labor organization, the Western Federation of Miners nineteen sixteen name changed to the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, was in part to try to reverse a downward trend in its membership numbers and to further distance itself from the IWW. Meanwhile, the IWW had become one of the most notorious and least trusted unions in the country. Many of its leaders and most prominent members were socialists, and a lot of the union's rhetoric was explicitly anti capitalist. The organization was also pascifist and against military conscriptions. Conscription, and it was the only major union in the United States to oppose the nation's involvement in World War One. It was extremely easy for the Wobbly's opponents to characterize this socialist passive him, especially in wartime, as anti American and pro German, often quoting from the organization's own publications to do it. I w W activities had been met with mass arrests, deportations, and violence throughout its history, much of it covered in the media in a heavily sensationalized way. Wobblies were decried as agitators who descended on working communities to spread chaos and unrest. In some places, law enforcement ordered that i w W members be arrested on site and charged with vagrancy. It did not help that Big Bill Haywood had been arrested for murder in nineteen o six and was acquitted a year later. The mind Mill Union's work in Arizona went back decades long before that name change, including an attempts to unionize the Minds in nineteen o six and nineteen o seven. That effort involved the work of Mary Harris Jones, also known as Mother Jones, and it led to the mass firing of about a thousand workers. Like in pretty much every industry, the whole history of unionizing was very long and complicated and full of a lot of violence and firings. The IWW, on the other hand, was newly arrived in the area, having established the Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union Number eight hundred in nineteen seventeen, one of many local chapters that it launched in the Southwest during this time. As it established all these local unions, the IWW recruited members from the mines Mexican American workers, along with immigrants from Mexico and southern Europe, all of whom weren't particularly welcomed in other unions. These workers tended to be the lowest paid of everyone in the mines, and in Bisbee, Mexicans weren't even allowed to enter the mine itself and work underground. In June of nineteen seventeen, the IWW went to mine management in Bisbee with a list of demands, most of them related to safety and working conditions. These included only allowing blasting inside the mine outside of regular working hours and assigning two men to work on each machine. They also demanded an end to discrimination against union workers and immigrants, and the adoption of a flat wage system. The mine workers at the time were being paid based on the price of copper, which meant that their pay rates rose and fell over time, and the price of copper had skyrocketed thanks to the war, going from thirteen cents to thirty seven cents a pound, But the workers who had gotten a raise in their pay thanks to that had not really felt an corresponding increase in their standard of living, because the same factors that were causing the price of copper to go up also caused a whole lot of inflation in the area where the mines were, so in a lot of cases, everything was so much more expensive that they felt like they were taking home less money. In some industries, management had made concessions to unions and workers to keep production going during the war, but management in the Bisbee Minds denied all of the i w WS demands, also citing the war as a reason for turning them down. So this flat out denial became its own grievance because the mind workers as a group felt like they didn't have a way of making their voices heard or influencing their own working conditions. The President's Mediation Commission that was convened after this whole incident actually pinpointed this as the root of the whole thing, and their report they said quote. The crux of the conflict was the insistence of the men that the right and the power to obtain just treatment were in themselves basic conditions of employment, and that they should not be compelled to depend for such just treatment on the benevolence or uncontrolled will of the employers. On June, the i w W called for a strike, although this wasn't actually put to a vote by any of the union's membership. Even so, thousands of workers stayed off the job the next day, either refusing to report to their own jobs or refusing to work strikebreakers. Meanwhile, the secretary of the mine mill union encouraged strike breaking, saying that anyone who crossed the picket line wasn't a scab because it wasn't really a legal strike. Sheriff Harry Wheeler also asked for help from federal and state authorities, but was denied because it seemed like a simple labor dispute that was proceeding peacefully. As the strike progressed over the next couple of weeks, two organizations sprung up in town to oppose it. One was the Workman's Loyalty League, which was made up of mine workers who were opposed to the strike. The other was the Citizens Protective League or CPL. The CPL was made up of prominent citizens, powerful business people, and some of the upper management at the mines. It had originally been established in the face of a previous labor dispute, and it reconvened during the nineteen seventeen strike. Soon rumors and allegations were spreading through Bisbee in the surrounding area about the Wobblies and the strike. Some of these were picked up into Sminated through the newspaper, which, as we said before the break was owned by the mind. People alleged that German infiltrators had made their way into the i w W, and the strike was intended to weaken the United States during the war or possibly sabotage the entire copper industry. They also reported that the i w W was planning to disrupt the city's Independence Day festivities, with the Loyalty League marching in a parade on the fourth. To prove them wrong. Sheriff Wheeler started deputizing citizens of Bisbee during all of this, and eventually more than a thousand people had been made temporary deputies. Most of them were members of the CPL. Even with these a thousand additional untrained law enforcement people on the scene, everything was still proceeding peacefully, though there were heated arguments, but there was no actual violence. On July eleven, Wheeler released a statement calling for the deportation of everyone involved in the strike, accusing them of treason and vagrancy, and encouraging women and children to stay indoors. A very similar deportation had happened in Jerome, Arizona, just to day earlier, but on a much smaller scale. After the i w W called for a strike in Jerome's Minds, workers stayed off the job. The sheriff had four IWW leaders arrested and issued an order for all Wobblies to leave town within twelve hours. At two am on July twelfth, calls started going out to the deputized members of the Citizens Protective League, and this included calls to people living in Douglas, which was another border town about thirty miles or forty eight kilometers away. By five am, they had gathered about two thousand deputies, all of them wearing white arm bands to distinguish themselves from the Wobblies and the striking workers. Law enforcement didn't contact the governor, the federal government, the military, or anyone else to ask for aid or explain what was going on. This vigilante mob seized a telegraph station to try to censor any outgoing communications about what was happening, and they started moving through Bisbee, nearby Lowell, and the surrounding area, interrogating people at gunpoint about whether they were working, and rounding up anyone believed to be a member of the i w W, a striking worker, or someone who supported the strike. This included Archie Cook, arrested by his own brother, Edward Leslie Cook, who had been told that if he didn't go along with the mob, he would be deported himself. One minor and one deputy were killed during this massive round up. Jim Brew, who was a boilerman's helper and an IWW organizer, killed Orson McRae, who was a shift boss at the Calumet and Arizona mine and also a former candidate for counsel and a member of the Loyalty League. Brew had called out a warning that he would shoot anybody who tried to take him, and when several men continued to move towards his boarding house, he fired through the screen door. Multiple men in the mob returned fire, and the coroner's inquest that followed all of this didn't determine which of them killed brew. The deputized mob forced about two thousand men to march to war in Ballpark, where they were held in the stands until the arrival of a train provided by El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, which was a subsidiary of Phelps Dodge. Once the train arrived, the men being held were ordered to renounce the strike and return to work, or to board the train's cattle cars. In the words of deported worker Fred Watson, who had worked in the Copper Queen mine, quote, you either put a white rag around your arm, or you left town. A few hundred men, most of them not actually employed in the mines, agreed to these terms, and they left. The rest were forced into twenty three manure cape cattle cars in ninety degree heat at his thirty five degrees celsius. And then they were hauled out of town. And we're going to talk about where they went, but first we will pause and have a little sponsor break. After leaving busby Arizona to the train carrying about twelve hundred men under armed guard, traveled sixteen hours east to Columbus, New Mexico, home of Camp for Long. The hope was to leave the deported men there, that the people who would arrange his whole deportation had not really thought it through. Camp Furlong did not have enough food or the necessary hygiene facilities to just absorb so many people, so the train turned back west and stopped in Airmana's, New Mexico, where the men spent the night in the cattle cars. They had very little in the way of food, water, and protection from the elements until troops arrived on July four and escorted them back to Columbus. This time, the army provided them with rations and water, and tasked some of them with digging latrines, also telling them they were all free to go. They set up what was essentially a refugee camp, where many of them stayed for months. Back in Bisbee, the town placed armed guards on all the roads to keep the deported workers from coming back. Said he also established a kangaroo court, which continued to try and deport hundreds of people for vagrancy and other charges, most of which were pretty flimsy at best. Over the next couple of months, they threatened the people that continued to be deported with lynching if they returned. Some of the men in the refugee camp got legal advice from Attorney W. B. Cleary, who wrote a statement saying that they would return to work if President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the minds and provided a military escort back to Bisbee for them. But other than that, they were essentially stuck. Although they were free to go, where most of them wanted to go was home, back to Bisbee, where many of them had families and children, but Bisbee would not take them. About two hundred men did leave the camp on August five, and most of them made their way to other cities in town, and afterward the army conducted a census of everyone who was left. They found that there was no truth at all to the idea that the Wobblies had been infiltrated by huge numbers of Germans. Of the nearly nine hundred men left in camp, only about twenty were German. Most of the deported men were immigrants, but a hundred and sixty seven described themselves as Americans. There were also two hundred twenty nine Mexicans, a hundred and seventy nine immigrants from various parts of the Balkans, sixty seven Irish, and thirty two British, along with smaller numbers of people from a very long list of other countries. Almost eight hundred of the men in the camp said that they owned property. At first, public opinion was in favor of all of this, particularly in mining communities. A publication from the Arizona Chapter of the American Mining Congress, published not long after, describes it as an accomplishment, praising the sheriff and citizens of the county for quote, removing one thousand enemies of the government, disloyal citizens from the state of proceeding probably without precedent in the history of the country in point of the number of men handled and the celerity and thoroughness with which the work was accomplished. But at the same time, various people and organizations were trying to negotiate with the minds in the city of Bisbee. One of these was former Arizona Governor George W. P. Hunt, who had been a big supporter of organized labor throughout his time in office. A disputed nineteen sixteen election had gone to his opponent Thomas E. Campbell by order of the Arizona Supreme Court. Another court decision would eventually put Hunt back in office, but in the meantime, he was acting as a mediator in the Busbee dispute, along with other labor disputes that were going on in Arizona. This was part of a whole lot of strikes and disputes, especially in the mining industry. He was doing this at the request of President Wilson. The Arizona Federation of Labor also contacted President at Wilson in August to ask for help for the deported miners, but Wilson was reluctant to take action. He'd been close friends with Cleveland Dodge of Phelps Dodge Mining Company for years. When the Arizona Federation of Labor made its request, Wilson replied that he was quote loath to believe that genuine representatives of the Federation of Labor would send me a message containing so unjust and offensive an intimation. I'm just gonna say it was not unjust and offensive, it was correct. Hunt later sent Wilson a full report of what had happened, and he sent a copy to the Department of Labor as well, and in this report he pointed out that a lot of the people involved were still stuck in Columbus because all they wanted was just to go home and have their basic rights restored. After receiving Hunt's report, Wilson established a Mediation Commission to investigate what had happened and advise on a resolution. Felix Frankfurter, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, was one of its members. As the commissi and was conducting its investigation, the governor instructed the Citizens Protective League to disband their kangaroo court and put the city back into normal operations. The Mediation Commission released its report in October, and the report found that the Bisbee deportation had been illegal and that no one could substantiate their claims that the Wobblings and the Minds had been infiltrated by Germans. They also noted that nobody who made that claim could even really say where they had come by that information in the first place. Instead, the commission found that the deportations were motivated by fear, not by actual danger. To quote from the report, the plan for the deportation and its execution are attributable to the belief in the minds of those who engineered it, that violence was contemplated by the strikers and sympathizers with the strikers who had come into the district from without, that life and property would be insecure unless such deportation was undertaken, and that the state was without the necessary armed force to events such anticipated violence and to safeguard life and property within the district. This belief has no justification in the evidence in support of it presented by the parties who harbored it. The report also strongly criticized the use of repressive tactics to deal with such labor unrest, calling it quote the source of much bitterness, turns radical labor leaders into martyrs, thus increasing their following, and worst of all, in the minds of the workers, tends to implicate the government as a partisan in the in the economic conflict. Later on, the document continued, quote, too often, there is a glaring inconsistency between our democratic purposes in this war abroad and the autocratic conduct of some of those guiding the industry at home. This inconsistency is emphasized by episodes such as the Bisbee deportations in the aftermath of the deportation, the Department of Justice ordered the arrests of twenty one Phelps Dodge executives, and several local leaders of BISBEE, but it was eventually determined that no federal law had been broken, so there was nothing to charge them with in federal court. The first federal interstate kidnapping law was the Lindberg Law, which was not passed until nine two after the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's son. If there had been a federal kidnapping law before these deportations, that clearly would have applied, because the men were literally forced into a train and then taken across state lines. Even though no federal charges could be filed, the Department of Justice recommended that Arizona prosecute any violations of state law. Several of the men had also been drafted while they were stuck in that refugee camp, which meant that the deportation had run a foul of the selective draft law, so the Department of Justice advised Arizona to pass that part along to the Secretary of State. The Department of Justice also advised that the aspect of the deportation that interfered with interstate communication, like taking over the Telegraph office be directed to the Interstate Commerce Commission. In nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty, thousands of documents were filed in Coaches County Superior Court in the case of State of Arizona versus Phelps Dodge Corporation, which also named two hundred twenty four individual men as defendants, but only one of these ever came to trial, H. E. Wootton, who owned a hardware store. It's not really clear why out of everyone, Wotton was the only person who was tried, but he was ultimately acquitted. His defense was that he was following the quote law of necessity, and here is how the jury foreman described it afterward. Quote the verdict of the jury is a vindication of the deportation, if not in the legal sense, at least in the moral sense. No man could listen to the evidence adduced during the trial without feeling that the people of Bisbee were in eminent danger, and that if their fears were un grounded, yet they were apparently real and pressing. The essence of the law of necessity has explained and laid down to the jury by Judge Patty is that it protects a man and his invasion of the rights of others when his fear for his own safety or welfare is great enough to force him to a drastic step. That the spear does not have to be a fear of really of really existent dangers, but only of apparent danger when the appearance of that danger is so compelling as to be real to him that views it. But I feel like this is still a defense. We see, and you saw all the time I was scared, and even though that fear was not founded in anything, I have the defense that I was scared. As for the miners and their supporters, A Stewart Embry was tried in Tucson and found not guilty of incitement to riot, but the Wobblies as a group became a target on a more national scale. On September five, nineteen seventeen, the FBI rated every i w W office in the nation. Over the span of about twenty four hours, hundreds of i w W leaders were tried on charges of espionage. Every defendant was found guilty after less than an hour of deliberation. The District Attorney of Philadelphia called these raids and the trial that followed as undertaken quote very largely to put the I w W out of business. Some joined the military or found work in Minds and other cities, but many of them found themselves cut off from their homes and their property, and Busbee with really nowhere else to go. The labor dispute and the Commission's report did lead to a few changes in Bisbees minds. The three mind superintendents all set up official grievance procedures and got rid of the physical exam requirement. Wages in Bisbees minds also rose by about fifty percent in nineteen eighteen. This turned out to be temporary, though the mining industry and Bisbee started to suffer of the shift towards pit mining. Historians who look back on this are mostly agreed on the fact that the root of the workers dissatisfaction really came from not being able to have their grievances heard and address in a meaningful way. And then there's also a lot of consensus about the idea that the deportation was rooted in fear and not actual danger, but there is still debate about which fear had the greatest part of it, whether it was the fear and dislike of immigrants in this general national climate of xenophobia and nativism, or whether it was fear and dislike of unions and organized labor, especially the Wobblies. I cannot emphasize the Wobblies were so distrusted and disliked that it is hard even today to figure out which charges against them were real and which are completely made up. Uh Like the this massive trial that took place that we referenced earlier included um just like it's it's often described as a show trial and not like an actual methodical investigation, and a lot of the people that were sentenced and went to prison where people who hadn't been involved in the organization in years. The whole huge thing that involves Kinnessaw mountain landis who was a person that has been on my short list for an episode for a really long time. So maybe at some point we will get to this wildly trial. It reminds me of the Palmer Raids in a lot of ways, like this whole incident and that whole trial. Like I think there are people that feel like it's sort of a set a set of precedent for the Palmer Raids. Anyway, A whole big, complicated thing. I thought this was gonna be a real, relatively straightforward story when I got into it, because it seems like on the surface surface, such a okay, there was a labor dispute and then they put everybody on a train and deported them. But then the whole huge history, like the entangled history of the labor organizations in the minds and everything that was happening in World War One, makes it way more complicated than I expected when I got into this. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

Happy Saturday. Today's classic is the Bisbee Deportation, and it has ties to a couple of recent episodes. One is The Great Stork Derby. In that episode, we talked about how racism and anti immigrant attitudes were part of the news coverage of the derby. Although the Stork Derby took place in Canada and the Bisbee Deportation was in the United States, a lot of the context surrounding those attitudes is the same. We talked about that context a lot in this episode, and in our recent episode on Lucy Parsons, we discussed her being part of the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, but we didn't talk that much about the Wobblies as an organization. This episode does. Though. This episode also has one of the more embarrassing errors we've made on the show, and we're sharing it again in spite of that. When writing this episode, I typed international when I met industrial, and not only did I do that, I did it more than once. So anytime you hear one of us say international Workers of the World, which is both incorrect and redundant, just mentally correct that first word to industrial in your mind. This episode originally came out on May SWO. We hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Jay. We are going to talk about the Bisbee deportation. This is a v incident that has elements of a labor strike and a wartime hysteria, and a vigilante mob and a mass propaganda effort, and that's all rolled into one. It took place in Bisbee, Arizona, which is southeast of Tucson and close to the United States border with Mexico, and it was part of a series of labor disputes in Arizona's mining industry during World War One that led to a loss of about a hundred million pounds of copper. It was also part of an ongoing series of deportations and arrests and even murders that targeted members of the International Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. There was a lot going on here. As I got into this this podcast outline, I began wishing that we had already done episodes on a number of people and organizations and events in it, because that would have been helpful. But sadly we do not already have episodes on the Wobblies and the entire mining industry of Arizona, etcetera. Well, this is the start, and then you never know where we'll go from here. The city of Bisbee dates back to the Apache Wars, which were an ongoing series of armed conflicts between the United States and various Apache tribes and nation in the American Southwest. In eighteen seventy seven, the U. S. Army was searching the mountains of Arizona Territory for hostile groups of Apache. A civilian tracker who was working with them spotted signs of minerals, which led to the area's first mining claim. Bisbee grew rapidly from there thanks to the presence of lead, silver, gold, and especially copper. By the turn of the twentieth century, more than twenty thousand people lived in Bisbee and the communities immediately adjacent to it. Three companies had mines in the immediate area, and together these mines employed about five thousand people. By far, the largest of these companies was Phelps Dodge, which produced sixty three percent of the region's copper and owned the area's most productive mine, which was the Copper Queen. Shattick. Dean Mining Company and the Calumet and Arizona Mine ran much smaller mining operations in the area as well. Phelps Dodge also owned a lot the town, including the hospital, the newspaper, the only department store, and the library. The town's y m c A and y w c A had been established at the behest of James Douglas, who was president of the Copper Queen Mine. There were also businesses that weren't owned by or affiliated with Phelps Dodge, but they all knew that they had to stay on the company's good side to remain afloat. So this starts to sound like a really stereotypical company town, and a lot of ways it was, but it wasn't quite as exploitive as most of the company towns that have come up on the show before. The mining companies did plan out the neighborhoods, and they segregated the workforce by race and ethnicity in those neighborhoods, but a lot of people living there actually owned their homes. Phelps Dodge ran a company store, but overall its prices were comparable with other normal stores. It wasn't a case of the company paying miners in script that could only be used at the company store and then inflating the prices there so much that there workers were always in debt to the company. So none of this, though, was because Phelps, Dodge or the rest of the mining companies were particularly benevolent. It was because they wanted to attract men with families to work in the mines with the hope of reducing turnover and the in their labor force. The idea was that if men brought their families to this nice place to live that had lots of amenities, then they wouldn't have to keep retraining and finding new workers. I mean, it's all a business decision. So overall, Bisbee had a reputation as a pretty good place to live and work, especially for white miners. It had long had a reputation as a quote white man's camp. At first, that had meant that Chinese workers were excluded, but it gradually shifted to mean that the white miners got the most desirable and highest paying jobs. The pay overall was towards the top end of the range for the industry, and all those amenities that Phelps Dodge was paying for didn't always exist in other mining towns and camps. But at the same time, the situation was tense and Bisbee. In nineteen seventeen, Bisbee was very close to the border with Mexico, where the Mexican Revolution had started in nineteen ten and was still ongoing. In addition to the war going on just across the border, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa had attacked Columbus, New Mexico, which was roughly two hundred miles or three d twenty one kilometers away, on March nine of nineteen sixteen. Nineteen people had been killed and much of Columbus burned to the ground, and other communities near the border were afraid that something similar might happen to them. World War One added another layer to this fear. In January of nineteen seventeen, British cryptographers deciphered a telegram from German foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman which promised that Germany would return Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to Mexico if Mexico joined the war on the side of Germany. These states had all previously been a part of Mexico and Texas had declared its independence from Mexico in eighteen thirty six, and the territory that would become Arizona and New Mexico, along with most of the rest of the American West and Southwest, was ceded to the United States in eighteen forty eight, at the end of the Mexican American War. Britain presented this telegram, known as the Zimmerman Telegram, to the United States on February, and by March it had been printed in newspapers. Wasn't very long after that that the United States actually entered the war. So now, on top of being worried that the Mexican Revolution might spill over into the United States, people living near the border were worried that Mexico would wind up and would wind up as allies of Germany and attack the United States directly. And yet another source of tension in Bisbee in nineteen seventeen was a general nationwide trend towards xenophobia and nativism. On February five, Congress passed the Immigration Act of nineteen seventeen, overriding a veto by President Woodrow will Wilson. We haven't talked about this particular piece of legislation on the show before because most of the time it was superseded by other laws that were more relevant to the subject at hand, but at the time it was the strictest immigration law the country had seen. Before the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two, the United States had no federal laws restricting immigration. If you could get here, you could stay. The Immigration Act of nineteen seventeen built on the Chinese Exclusion Act, along with other immigration laws and practices that had been put in place in the intervening years. Section three of the nineteen seventeen legislation included a colossally long list of people who were excluded from admission into the United States, including, as a few excerpts, quote idiots, imbeciles, and feeble minded persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority, poppers, professional beggars, and vagrants, anarchists, con tracked, laborers, and people whose passage was paid for by someone else. The act also established what was known as the Asiatic Exclusion Zone, which barred immigrants from most Eastern Asia and Pacific islands. It mandated a literacy test as well, along with attacks of eight dollars per person for adult immigrants, which is equivalent to roughly a hundred and sixty dollars today. This legislation was heavily influenced by the eugenics movement and the idea that the United States should only allow people with so called good stock into the country. This was happening at the same time that Henry H. Goddard was studying the people who arrived at Ellis Island hoping to immigrate to the United States. We talked about that work in our episode called the Calicacs and the Eugenicists. He published work from this research that claimed that forty percent of immigrants were so called feeble minded, including eighty three percent of Jews, seventy of Italians, eighty percent of Hungarians, and eighty seven percent of Russians. This nineteen seventeen legislation gives you a pretty good idea of how the country was feeling about immigration, but it wasn't really all that successful at reducing the number of quote undesirable immigrants or immigrants from undesirable countries. In ninety four, it would be replaced by another law known as the Johnson Read Act, which was also inspired by the eugenics movement with a goal of limiting immigration from southern and Eastern Europe, and workers from those countries were a significant part of the labor pool in Bisbee. All of this, the minds, the war, and the rising tide of anti immigrant sentiment fed into the Bisbee deportation. And we have not even gotten to the presence of the Wobblies yet, who were described as anything from a menace to quote, the waste material of creation which should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion. We will talk about the Wobblies and who they were and why everyone hated them so much after a sponsor break. By seventeen, there were two major unions representing miners in Bisbee, Arizona, and those two organizations were really tangled up in one another's histories. One was the International Union of Mine Mill and Smelter Workers, also known as mine Mill which had previously been known as the Western Federation of Miners or WFM. The WFM had been established in eightee and had become known for radical and sometimes violent tactics and also for violent retaliation against the union's activities. The other was the Industrial Workers of the World or i W. W also known as the Wobbly E's. The i w W was founded in nineteen o five, and one of its founders was William Haywood, known as Big Bill, formerly of the WFM. Many of the w FM's most radical members moved over to the i w W, and by nineteen o seven, the Western Federation of Miners had denounced the International Workers of the World. Concerned that the IWW's focus on revolution was overshadowing its focus on labor organization, the Western Federation of Miners nineteen sixteen name changed to the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, was in part to try to reverse a downward trend in its membership numbers and to further distance itself from the IWW. Meanwhile, the IWW had become one of the most notorious and least trusted unions in the country. Many of its leaders and most prominent members were socialists, and a lot of the union's rhetoric was explicitly anti capitalist. The organization was also pascifist and against military conscriptions. Conscription, and it was the only major union in the United States to oppose the nation's involvement in World War One. It was extremely easy for the Wobbly's opponents to characterize this socialist passive him, especially in wartime, as anti American and pro German, often quoting from the organization's own publications to do it. I w W activities had been met with mass arrests, deportations, and violence throughout its history, much of it covered in the media in a heavily sensationalized way. Wobblies were decried as agitators who descended on working communities to spread chaos and unrest. In some places, law enforcement ordered that i w W members be arrested on site and charged with vagrancy. It did not help that Big Bill Haywood had been arrested for murder in nineteen o six and was acquitted a year later. The mind Mill Union's work in Arizona went back decades long before that name change, including an attempts to unionize the Minds in nineteen o six and nineteen o seven. That effort involved the work of Mary Harris Jones, also known as Mother Jones, and it led to the mass firing of about a thousand workers. Like in pretty much every industry, the whole history of unionizing was very long and complicated and full of a lot of violence and firings. The IWW, on the other hand, was newly arrived in the area, having established the Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union Number eight hundred in nineteen seventeen, one of many local chapters that it launched in the Southwest during this time. As it established all these local unions, the IWW recruited members from the mines Mexican American workers, along with immigrants from Mexico and southern Europe, all of whom weren't particularly welcomed in other unions. These workers tended to be the lowest paid of everyone in the mines, and in Bisbee, Mexicans weren't even allowed to enter the mine itself and work underground. In June of nineteen seventeen, the IWW went to mine management in Bisbee with a list of demands, most of them related to safety and working conditions. These included only allowing blasting inside the mine outside of regular working hours and assigning two men to work on each machine. They also demanded an end to discrimination against union workers and immigrants, and the adoption of a flat wage system. The mine workers at the time were being paid based on the price of copper, which meant that their pay rates rose and fell over time, and the price of copper had skyrocketed thanks to the war, going from thirteen cents to thirty seven cents a pound, But the workers who had gotten a raise in their pay thanks to that had not really felt an corresponding increase in their standard of living, because the same factors that were causing the price of copper to go up also caused a whole lot of inflation in the area where the mines were, so in a lot of cases, everything was so much more expensive that they felt like they were taking home less money. In some industries, management had made concessions to unions and workers to keep production going during the war, but management in the Bisbee Minds denied all of the i w WS demands, also citing the war as a reason for turning them down. So this flat out denial became its own grievance because the mind workers as a group felt like they didn't have a way of making their voices heard or influencing their own working conditions. The President's Mediation Commission that was convened after this whole incident actually pinpointed this as the root of the whole thing, and their report they said quote. The crux of the conflict was the insistence of the men that the right and the power to obtain just treatment were in themselves basic conditions of employment, and that they should not be compelled to depend for such just treatment on the benevolence or uncontrolled will of the employers. On June, the i w W called for a strike, although this wasn't actually put to a vote by any of the union's membership. Even so, thousands of workers stayed off the job the next day, either refusing to report to their own jobs or refusing to work strikebreakers. Meanwhile, the secretary of the mine mill union encouraged strike breaking, saying that anyone who crossed the picket line wasn't a scab because it wasn't really a legal strike. Sheriff Harry Wheeler also asked for help from federal and state authorities, but was denied because it seemed like a simple labor dispute that was proceeding peacefully. As the strike progressed over the next couple of weeks, two organizations sprung up in town to oppose it. One was the Workman's Loyalty League, which was made up of mine workers who were opposed to the strike. The other was the Citizens Protective League or CPL. The CPL was made up of prominent citizens, powerful business people, and some of the upper management at the mines. It had originally been established in the face of a previous labor dispute, and it reconvened during the nineteen seventeen strike. Soon rumors and allegations were spreading through Bisbee in the surrounding area about the Wobblies and the strike. Some of these were picked up into Sminated through the newspaper, which, as we said before the break was owned by the mind. People alleged that German infiltrators had made their way into the i w W, and the strike was intended to weaken the United States during the war or possibly sabotage the entire copper industry. They also reported that the i w W was planning to disrupt the city's Independence Day festivities, with the Loyalty League marching in a parade on the fourth. To prove them wrong. Sheriff Wheeler started deputizing citizens of Bisbee during all of this, and eventually more than a thousand people had been made temporary deputies. Most of them were members of the CPL. Even with these a thousand additional untrained law enforcement people on the scene, everything was still proceeding peacefully, though there were heated arguments, but there was no actual violence. On July eleven, Wheeler released a statement calling for the deportation of everyone involved in the strike, accusing them of treason and vagrancy, and encouraging women and children to stay indoors. A very similar deportation had happened in Jerome, Arizona, just to day earlier, but on a much smaller scale. After the i w W called for a strike in Jerome's Minds, workers stayed off the job. The sheriff had four IWW leaders arrested and issued an order for all Wobblies to leave town within twelve hours. At two am on July twelfth, calls started going out to the deputized members of the Citizens Protective League, and this included calls to people living in Douglas, which was another border town about thirty miles or forty eight kilometers away. By five am, they had gathered about two thousand deputies, all of them wearing white arm bands to distinguish themselves from the Wobblies and the striking workers. Law enforcement didn't contact the governor, the federal government, the military, or anyone else to ask for aid or explain what was going on. This vigilante mob seized a telegraph station to try to censor any outgoing communications about what was happening, and they started moving through Bisbee, nearby Lowell, and the surrounding area, interrogating people at gunpoint about whether they were working, and rounding up anyone believed to be a member of the i w W, a striking worker, or someone who supported the strike. This included Archie Cook, arrested by his own brother, Edward Leslie Cook, who had been told that if he didn't go along with the mob, he would be deported himself. One minor and one deputy were killed during this massive round up. Jim Brew, who was a boilerman's helper and an IWW organizer, killed Orson McRae, who was a shift boss at the Calumet and Arizona mine and also a former candidate for counsel and a member of the Loyalty League. Brew had called out a warning that he would shoot anybody who tried to take him, and when several men continued to move towards his boarding house, he fired through the screen door. Multiple men in the mob returned fire, and the coroner's inquest that followed all of this didn't determine which of them killed brew. The deputized mob forced about two thousand men to march to war in Ballpark, where they were held in the stands until the arrival of a train provided by El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, which was a subsidiary of Phelps Dodge. Once the train arrived, the men being held were ordered to renounce the strike and return to work, or to board the train's cattle cars. In the words of deported worker Fred Watson, who had worked in the Copper Queen mine, quote, you either put a white rag around your arm, or you left town. A few hundred men, most of them not actually employed in the mines, agreed to these terms, and they left. The rest were forced into twenty three manure cape cattle cars in ninety degree heat at his thirty five degrees celsius. And then they were hauled out of town. And we're going to talk about where they went, but first we will pause and have a little sponsor break. After leaving busby Arizona to the train carrying about twelve hundred men under armed guard, traveled sixteen hours east to Columbus, New Mexico, home of Camp for Long. The hope was to leave the deported men there, that the people who would arrange his whole deportation had not really thought it through. Camp Furlong did not have enough food or the necessary hygiene facilities to just absorb so many people, so the train turned back west and stopped in Airmana's, New Mexico, where the men spent the night in the cattle cars. They had very little in the way of food, water, and protection from the elements until troops arrived on July four and escorted them back to Columbus. This time, the army provided them with rations and water, and tasked some of them with digging latrines, also telling them they were all free to go. They set up what was essentially a refugee camp, where many of them stayed for months. Back in Bisbee, the town placed armed guards on all the roads to keep the deported workers from coming back. Said he also established a kangaroo court, which continued to try and deport hundreds of people for vagrancy and other charges, most of which were pretty flimsy at best. Over the next couple of months, they threatened the people that continued to be deported with lynching if they returned. Some of the men in the refugee camp got legal advice from Attorney W. B. Cleary, who wrote a statement saying that they would return to work if President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the minds and provided a military escort back to Bisbee for them. But other than that, they were essentially stuck. Although they were free to go, where most of them wanted to go was home, back to Bisbee, where many of them had families and children, but Bisbee would not take them. About two hundred men did leave the camp on August five, and most of them made their way to other cities in town, and afterward the army conducted a census of everyone who was left. They found that there was no truth at all to the idea that the Wobblies had been infiltrated by huge numbers of Germans. Of the nearly nine hundred men left in camp, only about twenty were German. Most of the deported men were immigrants, but a hundred and sixty seven described themselves as Americans. There were also two hundred twenty nine Mexicans, a hundred and seventy nine immigrants from various parts of the Balkans, sixty seven Irish, and thirty two British, along with smaller numbers of people from a very long list of other countries. Almost eight hundred of the men in the camp said that they owned property. At first, public opinion was in favor of all of this, particularly in mining communities. A publication from the Arizona Chapter of the American Mining Congress, published not long after, describes it as an accomplishment, praising the sheriff and citizens of the county for quote, removing one thousand enemies of the government, disloyal citizens from the state of proceeding probably without precedent in the history of the country in point of the number of men handled and the celerity and thoroughness with which the work was accomplished. But at the same time, various people and organizations were trying to negotiate with the minds in the city of Bisbee. One of these was former Arizona Governor George W. P. Hunt, who had been a big supporter of organized labor throughout his time in office. A disputed nineteen sixteen election had gone to his opponent Thomas E. Campbell by order of the Arizona Supreme Court. Another court decision would eventually put Hunt back in office, but in the meantime, he was acting as a mediator in the Busbee dispute, along with other labor disputes that were going on in Arizona. This was part of a whole lot of strikes and disputes, especially in the mining industry. He was doing this at the request of President Wilson. The Arizona Federation of Labor also contacted President at Wilson in August to ask for help for the deported miners, but Wilson was reluctant to take action. He'd been close friends with Cleveland Dodge of Phelps Dodge Mining Company for years. When the Arizona Federation of Labor made its request, Wilson replied that he was quote loath to believe that genuine representatives of the Federation of Labor would send me a message containing so unjust and offensive an intimation. I'm just gonna say it was not unjust and offensive, it was correct. Hunt later sent Wilson a full report of what had happened, and he sent a copy to the Department of Labor as well, and in this report he pointed out that a lot of the people involved were still stuck in Columbus because all they wanted was just to go home and have their basic rights restored. After receiving Hunt's report, Wilson established a Mediation Commission to investigate what had happened and advise on a resolution. Felix Frankfurter, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, was one of its members. As the commissi and was conducting its investigation, the governor instructed the Citizens Protective League to disband their kangaroo court and put the city back into normal operations. The Mediation Commission released its report in October, and the report found that the Bisbee deportation had been illegal and that no one could substantiate their claims that the Wobblings and the Minds had been infiltrated by Germans. They also noted that nobody who made that claim could even really say where they had come by that information in the first place. Instead, the commission found that the deportations were motivated by fear, not by actual danger. To quote from the report, the plan for the deportation and its execution are attributable to the belief in the minds of those who engineered it, that violence was contemplated by the strikers and sympathizers with the strikers who had come into the district from without, that life and property would be insecure unless such deportation was undertaken, and that the state was without the necessary armed force to events such anticipated violence and to safeguard life and property within the district. This belief has no justification in the evidence in support of it presented by the parties who harbored it. The report also strongly criticized the use of repressive tactics to deal with such labor unrest, calling it quote the source of much bitterness, turns radical labor leaders into martyrs, thus increasing their following, and worst of all, in the minds of the workers, tends to implicate the government as a partisan in the in the economic conflict. Later on, the document continued, quote, too often, there is a glaring inconsistency between our democratic purposes in this war abroad and the autocratic conduct of some of those guiding the industry at home. This inconsistency is emphasized by episodes such as the Bisbee deportations in the aftermath of the deportation, the Department of Justice ordered the arrests of twenty one Phelps Dodge executives, and several local leaders of BISBEE, but it was eventually determined that no federal law had been broken, so there was nothing to charge them with in federal court. The first federal interstate kidnapping law was the Lindberg Law, which was not passed until nine two after the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's son. If there had been a federal kidnapping law before these deportations, that clearly would have applied, because the men were literally forced into a train and then taken across state lines. Even though no federal charges could be filed, the Department of Justice recommended that Arizona prosecute any violations of state law. Several of the men had also been drafted while they were stuck in that refugee camp, which meant that the deportation had run a foul of the selective draft law, so the Department of Justice advised Arizona to pass that part along to the Secretary of State. The Department of Justice also advised that the aspect of the deportation that interfered with interstate communication, like taking over the Telegraph office be directed to the Interstate Commerce Commission. In nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty, thousands of documents were filed in Coaches County Superior Court in the case of State of Arizona versus Phelps Dodge Corporation, which also named two hundred twenty four individual men as defendants, but only one of these ever came to trial, H. E. Wootton, who owned a hardware store. It's not really clear why out of everyone, Wotton was the only person who was tried, but he was ultimately acquitted. His defense was that he was following the quote law of necessity, and here is how the jury foreman described it afterward. Quote the verdict of the jury is a vindication of the deportation, if not in the legal sense, at least in the moral sense. No man could listen to the evidence adduced during the trial without feeling that the people of Bisbee were in eminent danger, and that if their fears were un grounded, yet they were apparently real and pressing. The essence of the law of necessity has explained and laid down to the jury by Judge Patty is that it protects a man and his invasion of the rights of others when his fear for his own safety or welfare is great enough to force him to a drastic step. That the spear does not have to be a fear of really of really existent dangers, but only of apparent danger when the appearance of that danger is so compelling as to be real to him that views it. But I feel like this is still a defense. We see, and you saw all the time I was scared, and even though that fear was not founded in anything, I have the defense that I was scared. As for the miners and their supporters, A Stewart Embry was tried in Tucson and found not guilty of incitement to riot, but the Wobblies as a group became a target on a more national scale. On September five, nineteen seventeen, the FBI rated every i w W office in the nation. Over the span of about twenty four hours, hundreds of i w W leaders were tried on charges of espionage. Every defendant was found guilty after less than an hour of deliberation. The District Attorney of Philadelphia called these raids and the trial that followed as undertaken quote very largely to put the I w W out of business. Some joined the military or found work in Minds and other cities, but many of them found themselves cut off from their homes and their property, and Busbee with really nowhere else to go. The labor dispute and the Commission's report did lead to a few changes in Bisbees minds. The three mind superintendents all set up official grievance procedures and got rid of the physical exam requirement. Wages in Bisbees minds also rose by about fifty percent in nineteen eighteen. This turned out to be temporary, though the mining industry and Bisbee started to suffer of the shift towards pit mining. Historians who look back on this are mostly agreed on the fact that the root of the workers dissatisfaction really came from not being able to have their grievances heard and address in a meaningful way. And then there's also a lot of consensus about the idea that the deportation was rooted in fear and not actual danger, but there is still debate about which fear had the greatest part of it, whether it was the fear and dislike of immigrants in this general national climate of xenophobia and nativism, or whether it was fear and dislike of unions and organized labor, especially the Wobblies. I cannot emphasize the Wobblies were so distrusted and disliked that it is hard even today to figure out which charges against them were real and which are completely made up. Uh Like the this massive trial that took place that we referenced earlier included um just like it's it's often described as a show trial and not like an actual methodical investigation, and a lot of the people that were sentenced and went to prison where people who hadn't been involved in the organization in years. The whole huge thing that involves Kinnessaw mountain landis who was a person that has been on my short list for an episode for a really long time. So maybe at some point we will get to this wildly trial. It reminds me of the Palmer Raids in a lot of ways, like this whole incident and that whole trial. Like I think there are people that feel like it's sort of a set a set of precedent for the Palmer Raids. Anyway, A whole big, complicated thing. I thought this was gonna be a real, relatively straightforward story when I got into it, because it seems like on the surface surface, such a okay, there was a labor dispute and then they put everybody on a train and deported them. But then the whole huge history, like the entangled history of the labor organizations in the minds and everything that was happening in World War One, makes it way more complicated than I expected when I got into this. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,