Photo by Xavier Badosa | CC BY 2.0
“He who controls the past controls the future,” wrote George Orwell in 1984. Daniel Wolff doesn’t want to control the past, but he does want to paint an accurate picture of it. He does it well in his new book, Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913 (HarperCollins).
Wolff’s story revolves around the Kewanee Peninsula–the northernmost part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula–which once had some of the richest copper deposits on earth. Seven thousand years ago, Native Americans were able to mine it well enough to make tools. The advent of modern technology made the mines more productive, but the work was far from easy.
The early twentieth-century work day at the Calumet & Hecla mines on the Kewanee Peninsula “began by riding a thousand feet down into ill-lit, poorly ventilated mining shafts. There, the workers spent ten hours manning ‘widow makers,’ 170-pound drills that they held overhead, gouging out rock in search of copper…While the company’s stockholders received 400 percent returns on their investment and the general manager of the mine got a yearly salary of $125,000, workers were paid under a dollar a day.”
As Christmas approached in 1913, the workers had been on strike at C&H in Calumet, Michigan for almost five months. The ladies auxiliary of the union organized a Christmas party at Italian Hall for the miners’ kids. They sang songs and…