Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Bisbee Deportions & The Bisbee Riot

WYTS: Arizona Cardinals. Original post here.

Our history lesson today is about the town of Bisbee, Arizona. Currently, it is a former mining town in the southeast corner of the state. Its population has halved in the last century, now down to under 5,000 people. I do not expect you to know of it, it is not a place of much importance anymore. But Bisbee has a lot of history. We actually have two events, one in 1917 and another in 1919. There are The Bisbee Deportations and The Bisbee Riot. 

 

These civil unrests are the byproducts of World War I, a war which ended poorly for everybody involved. Three empire fell, and even the winning side was left in terrible shape. If anybody can be said to have "won WWI", it was the United States, whose global rivals were in ruins and the US was the dominant superpower for the rest of the century, whether we liked it or not. And even we left that war with a decade of reactionary conservative and racist politics, the repercussions of which we still suffer from now. To get to President Harding's vision of "Normalcy" required a lot of violence on both the labor and racial fronts. Bisbee, interestingly, had a big labor battle right before a racial battle, possibly a clue that race and labor concerns are directly related. We'll explore that idea further as this project continues.

 

Bisbee was a town of about 10,000 in 1917. It was a major source of copper thanks to its open pit strip mining operation, the Copper Queen Mine run by the Phelps Dodge Corporation. Copper, being a strategic war material, was a very turbulent commodity in the market. Prices were going up and down all over the place. Miners had their wages tied to the price of copper, so you'd never know if you'd be going hungry from one week to another. The workers wanted a better deal. This was a really dangerous, unpredictable, and pardon the pun, extractive industry, where foreign Slavic workers were usually mistreated. The miners wanted $6.00 per hour, the company wanted them to literally drop dead pulling out the copper ore. There are many, many big mining labor battles in this era, and battles are the correct term. Broncos fans (such as myself), watch this space.

In 1917 the miners went on strike, daring the company to do their worst. Their worst they got. Phelps Dodge responded by making the local sheriff, Harry C. Wheeler, basically military dictator of the surrounding county. He cut off all communications to the outside. On July 12th, 1917, during a labor action, Wheeler gathered a posse of 2,000 men and then grabbed 1,300 people off the streets. Most of them were strikers, some were supporters, some were just random people watching the show. The sheriff loaded these thousands of people onto cattle cars and dumped them in a random spot 200 miles away, leaving them with their lives and nothing else. It is possible they were all expected to just die out there in the desert. Luckily the state of Arizona and federal government did rescue everybody, with only one death reported. The workers were at least alive, but they were not welcome back in Bisbee. The strike was broken.

Cut to summer 1919 where labor tensions, unsurprisingly, have not cooled off. Turns out trying to massacre your employees does not end disputes forever. But there's more! WWI is over and a lot of black soldiers are coming home, scaring the bejesus out of white America. President Wilson, a guy who's racial record was... let's be nice and call it "mixed", did not do the greatest job in terms of integrating his men back home. Instead many black soldiers returned to the Red Summer, a series of pogroms across the country. These included incidents as varied as major urban riots in Chicago, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. There was a particularly horrible incident in Elaine, Arkansas where maybe as many as 240 people were murdered.

 

The Red Summer was not the same thing as the Red Scare, just to clarify. That was a separate anti-Bolshevik panic coinciding with major strike waves across the country, much of which involved the coal industry, to return to mining. We did win WWI, but the economy had been wrecked and people were very unsure of what would come next. Oh, also the Spanish Flu epidemic is ravaging the country too. 1919 is just one of those years like 1848 or 1968 or 2020. Just a real bad time.

In Bisbee, on July 3rd, a group of Buffalo Soldiers from the 10th Cavalry had come to town to take part in the Independence Day Parade scheduled the next day. The 10th Cavalry had not traveled to France, but this is a very distinguished unit, they fought in the Indian Wars and saved Roosevelt's ass on San Juan Hill and fought in the Philippines. That night they got a tip by some IWW Union organizers in Bisbee that the local police were planning to attack them. We don't know what was planned since it none of it went to plan. I should note that Sheriff Wheeler is no longer in power, he had gone to France to fight Germans and was a little busy with some legal troubles I'll get back to. The problem now is Bisbee Chief of Police, James Kempton.

 

Instead of an easy repeat of the Bisbee Deportations from 1917, we have the Bisbee Riot, where the 10th cavalry were in a full-on gunfight with the sheriff department in the town, in an area called Brewery Gulch, a red light district the local soldiers enjoyed. This is event is sometimes called The Battle of Brewery Gulch. They were not going out without a fight at least.  After a few hours of shooting, around midnight, the Buffalo Soldiers realized this could not go on forever. They surrendered and disarmed themselves, but not without regrets. One unarmed soldier was shot in the chest by a deputy just for fun, seemingly. The whole event probably had been staged to give the cops an excuse to murder the 10th Cavalry, though I do not think they expected this fierce of resistance. The next morning, Chief Kempton and the County Sheriff gave up and let everybody go home.

Now this could have been a lot worse, if not for the fact that agents of the Bureau of Investigation were in town. They were here trying to catch the IWW as Bolshevik agents undermining America. Instead they realized this town was a nightmare run by an evil corporation and a lynch mob police force. The feds actually helped defuse the situation. 

 

In the riots there no deaths, just the previously mentioned injured soldier and one poor bystander lady who was shot in the head. Nobody was punished on either side. 

 

Sheriff Wheeler, though, for his role in the Bisbee Deportions, faced federal charges. However, the Supreme Court decided in 1920 that the US Constitution does not protect citizens from being kidnapped, even if that means being rounded by a sheriff and left to die hundreds of miles from help. That's a matter for state courts, not federal.

Phelps-Dodge is now part of Freeport-McMoRan Inc. and is still mining copper to this day around the world. If you'd like, you can buy some shares right now!