Montana's Labor History

 This is a less practical post than most, but since it's Labor Day, I thought I'd share some resources relating to Montana's labor history. 

First up is this tour in Historic Montana, which features (in brief) a few of Montana labor temples, union halls, and other union-related sites, from Missoula's Free Speech Corner in Missoula to Forsyth's Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Hall. Note: There are MANY sites that are not included in this list. Not every town in Montana had (or has) a significant union presence, but every railroad division and subdivision point, logging, or mining town did. Where did working people (primarily workingmen) gather in your community?

My colleague, Rich Aarstad, created an intriguing timeline of Montana labor history. Reading it over, several things surprised me, including the first workers to organize a union in Montana in 1866. It's not who you think.

Butte was known as the Gibraltar of Labor, so it's not surprising that there is a lot of material connected to the city.

• The second half of "When Copper Was King," one of the twelve short films that make up Montana Mosaic, focuses on the growth of unions in early twentieth century Butte. (See the user guide for a brief synopsis; find the video.)
• "When Toil Meant Trouble" is a good, brief roundup of Butte's labor history, written by George Everrett. 
• "Death in the West" is an award-winning podcast focused on the murder of Frank Little. The creators also created a tour of Butte sites relating to Frank Little.  
• Anna East created a series of lesson plans to teach material from the book Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900-1960 (including two of them about unions), and we digitized excerpts from the book to go along with them. 
• For a particularly unsavory moment in Montana's labor history, see this National Archives Lesson Plan on the Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly and Butte Miners' Union boycott of Chinese and Japanese businesses. Learn about Hum Fay's lawsuit to end the boycott and read excerpts from his testimony.
• The Clark Chateau worked with a number of contemporary musicians to write new tunes for union songs published in Songs for the Butte Mining Camp, a booklet published by the IWW circa 1918 during the general strike that started after the Speculator-Granite Mountain Mine disaster and now preserved in the Butte-Silver Bow Archives.
• Speaking Speculator-Granite Mountain Mine disaster, here are some of the letters written by J.D. Moore, who died in the mine, some telegrams sent by families to the Anaconda Company, asking if their relatives survived, and here's an article about the disaster.

Most of Montana's unions were exclusively male, but not all of them. Here's a short article about Butte's Women’s Protective Union. Before Montana passed legislation guaranteeing women equal pay for equal work in 1919* (forty-four years before the 1963 federal Equal Pay Act!), women hired to work for the Northern Pacific Railroad in Livingston during World War I received the same wages as their male counterparts because of the union. 

The Montana Historical Society has digitized over 600 oral histories with Montana workers Voices of Labor. I'm honestly not sure how--or whether--teachers can use these. I'd love your ideas. I do know that before looking at any of these oral histories, you, or your students, will want to look at the index, which lists topics covered in the interviews. (Links to the indexes are at the top of the page.) University of Montana has also digitized its Unions and Labor Oral History Collection. 

Happy Labor Day.

*I learned this from Rich's Montana Labor History Timeline, too!

 

P.S. Don't miss the first of our monthly Monday Meetups, September 11, 4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. where I'll be sharing an Introduction to Montana Historical Society Resources. Register to earn one Renewal Unit.