Abstract
A tense exchange in John Sayles’ 1987 film Matewan offers viewers a quick lesson in labor history. “How’d Frank Little die?” C. E. Lively quizzes Joe Kenehan, when the latter attempts to join a clandestine organizing meeting. “Butte, Montana . . . they hung him from a railroad trestle,” wearily replies Kenehan (his interlocutor also demands to know other labor “insider” facts, like who wrote The Iron Heel, where Joe Hill is buried and which eye Big Bill Haywood is missing). The circumstances of Frank Little’s grisly death are still shrouded in mystery, but like Joe Hill he has become an indispensable figure in the history of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World).
As Arnold Stead acknowledges in Always on Strike: Frank Little and the Western Wobblies, one obstacle defies those interested in his titular subject: “There is little known about Frank Little before he springs to life as an Arizona member of the Western Federation of Miners in 1900” (p. 8). In fact, this sentence should be revised to “There is little known about Frank Little.” Stead attempts to fill the gaps, but unfortunately his effort misses the mark.
As the title and first chapter suggest, Stead argues that Little was a wobbly of a distinct western variety. The hard rock miners who formed the Western Federation of Miners in 1893 and the IWW in 1905 valued masculine independence and eschewed the discipline of the wage system. The miners’ unruliness extended to labor organization, too. The Eastern IWW, for example, operated on a “centralized direction, [with] a clear and strong, traditional organizational structure” (p. 36). Western miners, on the other hand, wrestled with the lure of individualism while living the creed of “Solidarity Forever.” Frank Little makes a few brief appearances in this chapter. He was a man of action steeled in the mines and Free Speech Fights; hobos and outcasts were his comrades in arms.
The remaining chapters blunder on numerous points. Stead attempts to tell the history of Frank Little, but that is difficult to do without mining primary sources for information. Instead, readers get the legend of Frank Little. The chapter about the Free Speech Fights begins with a promising discussion of social ignorance as a tool of state power; regrettably, the eight snapshots of Free Speech Fights are poorly contextualized, heavily drawn from secondary sources, and speculative. According to Stead, Little may have participated in an unemployed demonstration in 1913 in Los Angeles and walked alongside his hobo brethren in an ill-fated march of the same, or “he may still have been in Kansas City when the latter took place” (p. 58). A lengthy chapter about Little’s activities in the Mesabi Iron Range, the Midwestern wheat belt, and Oklahoma’s oil fields does justice to the IWW’s vision of One Big Union, but would benefit from editing.
While these criticisms of the book are valid, Stead is to be acknowledged for his effort to bring Frank Little into the light of American labor history. Little should be remembered for his efforts in “uniting the migratory harvester with his counterparts in the mines and the oil fields” and not simply for the gruesome end he met in Butte (p. 97).
Always on Strike is a reflection on the present inspired by history. For Stead, Little was a militant tribune of free speech whose outspoken criticism of World War I sealed his fate. “Today we need Frank Little most of all at an elemental, visceral level,” he concludes (p. 166). Indeed we do. Little shined a light on the biggest lies of his day, inspiring hobo outcasts, harvest stiffs, and hard rock miners to dream of a better world. To learn about Frank Little, however, one would do better to watch Travis Wilkerson’s 2002 film An Injury to One or read Melvyn Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All or Franklin Rosement’s Joe Hill. Always on Strike is not a usable past for those in search of inspiration.