Tag Archives: Calumet

Two Upcoming Events In Marquette, Michigan

Leave a reply

SWUP2015Gala

On Saturday, December 5th, I’ll be at Save the Wild UP’s December Gala, where I’ve been invited to give the keynote.

Save the Wild UP is a great local grassroots organization dedicated to preserving and celebrating the nature and the culture of the Upper Peninsula. The people at Save the Wild UP (most of them are volunteers) do the work of educators, naturalists, social scientists, industry watchdogs and field guides all throughout the year, and I hear they throw a great party, too.

If you can’t make it to Steinhaus Market on the 5th, and even if you live far from Marquette or have never been to the Upper Peninsula, check out Save the Wild UP’s website, learn about the critical work they’re doing, and consider making an end-of-year, tax-deductible contribution to support their work.

I’ll post the text of my remarks here after I talk.

On Monday, December 7th, the Peter White Library in Marquette will be screening 1913 Massacre,, the feature length documentary film I made with Ken Ross about the Italian Hall disaster and the Woody Guthrie song it inspired. Part of the library’s DocuMonday series, the screening is free and open to the public. The film starts at 7PM and runs 70 minutes, and I’ll stick around afterwards to take questions, talk and say hi.

Hope to see you there.

12-7DocuMonday

Moses Called The First Strike

Leave a reply

Cross-posted from my blog at 1913 Massacre:

People from all parts of Europe made their way to Calumet at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. The copper-mining town attracted so many immigrants — Germans, Italians, Croatians, Slovenians, Cornish, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians — that it’s sometimes jokingly referred to as “the smelting pot.” Finns would eventually outnumber them all.

Many who came here from Finland to work in the mines and start a new life also brought with them, or quickly became versed in, dangerous ideas. In 1913, Finns were known as agitators, radicals, socialists. They organized in Keweenaw mining communities and in Hancock they published a newspaper called Tyomies, or The Workingman. Even their preachers espoused the social gospel, railing from the pulpit against the unfair treatment and indignities the miners endured, and advocating a more just ordering of society.

Most of the men, women and children killed at Italian Hall on Christmas Eve, 1913 were Finnish-Americans. They were not all agitators and strikers or strikers’ wives and children; in fact, we interviewed people whose families were firmly against the strike and wanted the Western Federation of Miners run out of town, but nevertheless lost children in the mayhem at the Hall. The tragedy cut across the divisions of the strike even as it deepened some of them and created new ones.

A wreath-laying ceremony in Calumet yesterday to honor the Italian Hall dead included a delegation from Finland. The ceremony was part of this year’s FinnFest, an annual celebration of Finnish-American heritage and culture. (1913 Massacre is screening twice at FinnFest.) The Turun Metsankavijat Wind Band played the Finnish and American national anthems along with other, solemn music.

20130621-111459.jpg

Before the wreaths were laid by David Geisler, Calumet Village President, and Pertti Torstila, Finland’s Secretary of State in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Reverend Robert Langseth delivered an invocation.

Langseth began quietly. He acknowledged each official on stage, then talked about the Finnish preacher who had led his parish during the strike of 1913-1914. After a pause, he thundered out the words of a sermon delivered a century ago:

MOSES called the first strike! Against the Pharoah.

Then he began to elaborate on his social gospel theme. Langseth cited the book of Micah —

What does The Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God.

— and he spoke eloquently and passionately about justice and the need for reconciliation. It was beautiful. People in the crowd were visibly moved and weeping. The ceremony had invited us to mourn and honor the dead. Reverend Langseth was asking us to do even more: to respect and honor each other.

20130621-111707.jpg

People’s History is Alive

Leave a reply

Cross-posted from 1913 Massacre.
I love this tweet:

This is from the Twitter account of Voices of a People’s History.

I suspect it was posted partly in response to David Greenberg’s vituperative account of Howard Zinn’s life and work in The New Republic. Greenberg portrays Zinn as a deeply flawed, philandering charlatan, who didn’t keep pace with work in his own field, and kept “aloof from the intellectual ferment of the seminar rooms, journal offices, and conferences where radical history was being born.” As for Zinn’s best-selling A People’s History of the United States, Greenberg dismisses it as “a pretty lousy piece of work.”

Zinn has always had his detractors and defenders, and plenty of people have risen to his defense. (Clement Lime wrote one of the stronger responses to Greenberg, I think.) It’s interesting to think that our film might have a place in the conversation.

But that’s not what I like so much about this tweet. If there’s one thing we discovered about “people’s history” in the course of making our film, it’s that people’s history is alive. History lives and breathes in people; their memories, the stories they tell, the songs they sing, the photographs they cherish — all those things aren’t just artifacts or objects of study, even if historians say they are.

History is at work in everything people do — and in a place like Calumet, where past troubles were never really laid to rest, history can work in mysterious ways. People talk about the past in order to talk about the present; and if they do not want to talk about the past it will find a way to assert itself in the present. People may see in the past some faint image of ourselves and our lives, but more importantly we carry the past with us; it’s our constant companion. It comforts us and causes us pain; it can be a source of pride or shame, pleasure or remorse. It can entrap us and enrich us.

People’s history is alive not because there are historians who study it, but because, like it or not, deny it or embrace it, study it or try to forget it, it’s our story.

It’s 1913 Again in Michigan

1 Reply

Crossposted from 1913massacre.com

I’ve run across a few people drawing connections between the Italian Hall disaster and the school shooting yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut (e.g., here). Maybe listening to Woody’s song helps people register Newtown’s loss, or the horror of Newtown helps us understand a little better what it must have been like for the Italian Hall parents and the Calumet community as a whole in 1913. But beyond that I don’t think there’s a very meaningful connection to be made.

It is, however, worth reflecting on what happened in Calumet in December of 1913 and what’s happening in Michigan right now. This week, the Michigan legislature — without allowing much debate or deliberation, and over the protests of thousands — handed Governor Rick Snyder a bill making Michigan a “right to work” state. They added insult to injury a couple of days later when they passed Emergency Manager Legislation that Michigan voters had rejected on November 6th. This one-two punch is supposed to remedy Michigan’s economic woes and get the state back on the road to recovery. It looks more like a last-minute power grab before the next legislature is seated, enabled by another big-money subversion of democratic process.

Indeed, a provocative piece by labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein published last week cast the “right to work” legislation in Michigan as part of a “coup.” Lichtenstein sees here “a serious defeat not only for the unions but for the very idea of social solidarity.”

this conflict is about something far bigger — the meaning of solidarity, a way of feeling and thinking about the world of work that is the basis not just of the union idea, but of a humane cooperative society.

I am not entirely persuaded by Lichtenstein’s argument: I just don’t think the “idea of social solidarity” goes down in “defeat” so easily.

It was under attack in Calumet in 1913. The Christmas party at the Hall was itself an exhibition of solidarity, six months into a brutal strike. And after the Christmas Eve tragedy, the town came together, again, to mourn. They grieved, but they didn’t give up, even after they lost their bid to unionize and the strike was over. As Joe Krainatz says in our film, “They did go on. They did survive. They raised their families. They went to work in the mines again.” And what’s most remarkable is that they rebuilt their community; their feeling of solidarity and shared humanity survived even the closing of the mines and the ruin that came in its wake.

Maybe the lesson of Calumet is that human solidarity runs deep. Money and power have never really won out over it. So far, I haven’t seen any white flags waving in Michigan.

Bringing 1913 Massacre Back to Calumet

Leave a reply

Cross posted from my blog at 1913massacre.com

I still haven’t managed to find out exactly what George Stoney said about bringing a documentary film back to the place where it was shot, but Deanna Kamiel was kind enough to share her notes on remarks Stoney made on the topic at the “Tribute to George Stoney” in October of 2008 at the IFC Center.

On that occasion, Stoney showed an excerpt from Uprising of ‘34, and talked about some of the responses that the film’s subjects – the people in the film – had when he showed it to them. “It is right as a filmmaker,” Kamiel reports Stoney as having said on that occasion, “that you should be able to bring your film back to your subject.”

“Right”: that word from Deanna’s notes intrigues me most. It puts the emphasis on the filmmakers’ relationship with the subject and the moral onus on the filmmaker. It’s less about truth-telling — whatever that means when talking about documentary film — than it is about respect. It seems almost to suggest that bringing a film back to the people it represents re-establishes some order (some “right relationship”) that filmmaking can too often disrupt. Films are not, in this way of thinking, a matter of “taking” someone’s picture, but instead of establishing a relationship in which you are able to bring the film back to them – giving back, not just taking. The film could be a gift, just a way of restoring the moving image to its subject.

So today we flew to the Upper Peninsula, to bring our film, 1913 Massacre, back to its subject – the town of Calumet, Michigan. We are showing the film tomorrow at the Calumet Theatre and then again on Saturday. Many of the people who appear in our film will be there. And I am wondering about how this exchange will work. I am not expecting anything like a sense of closure or resolution. I am not sure what to expect.

As we walked around the town today it felt so eerily familiar, and somehow both real and imagined, actual and remembered, a story and a place, filled with the sights and voices and the sounds that are in our film (the sign outside Bill’s Electrical squeaking as it sways, the wind coming off the lake that so often made recording sound difficult, the rumble of an old truck making its way down Fifth Street). It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say that, for me at least, the place now feels a little haunted by the film we shot here.

I’m ready to admit that this might just be the confusion of our first day in town, and I’m wondering how we and, more importantly, 1913 Massacre will be received in the days to come. I suppose we will find out if we got it right, or at least if some people think we got some things right.

Updates on the Calumet screenings of 1913 Massacre here and here.

Same song, different verse – Bill Moyers on Woody Guthrie, Right Now

Leave a reply

Cross-posted from my blog over at 1913massacre.com:

In the most recent essay for his new “On Democracy” series, Bill Moyers picks up on the news that the George Kaiser Family Foundation has acquired the Woody Guthrie Archives for 3 million dollars. Plans to open a new center in Tulsa are already underway. Woody’s papers, drawings and things will be returning to Oklahoma. The irony is not lost on Moyers:

What he wrote and sang about caused the oil potentates and preachers who ran Oklahoma to consider him radical and disreputable. For many years he was the state’s prodigal son, but times change, and that’s the big news. Woody Guthrie has been rediscovered, even though Oklahoma’s more conservative than ever – one of the reddest of our red states with a governor who’s a favorite of the Tea Party.

Times change, and the scene may change; the cast of characters remains essentially the same. In 1913 Massacre, the Oklahoma oil barons and their patsy preachers play the parts of Michigan mining captains, Boston stockholders and the thugs they hire to do their dirty work.

Woody saw right through their change of costume. He knew that the man who robs you with a six-gun is likely to be more honest than the man who uses a fountain pen. In Oklahoma, in Michigan, in California, all around the country, he sang about the beauty of ordinary people whose undoing he witnessed. And the simple message at the heart of his songs is just as radical today as it ever was.

You just have to listen.

Moyers discovers it in This Land Is Your Land:

This land is mostly owned not by you and me but by the winner-take-all super rich who have bought up open spaces, built mega-mansions, turned vast acres into private vistas, and distanced themselves as far as they can from the common lot of working people – the people Woody wrote and sang about.

So in the video essay he produced about Woody Guthrie and the prospects for democracy in America now, Moyers might as well be describing Calumet in 1913 or Tom Joad’s California: “gross inequality,” he says, is “destroying us from within”. The question is what we’re going to do about it, this time.

Woody Guthrie and the Cambodian Thanksgiving Massacre

Leave a reply

I did a double take when I first read about the victims of the Cambodian stampede being taken to Calmette Hospital in Phnom Penh. For the past several years I’ve been working on a documentary film about another human stampede, which took place in 1913, in a town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula called Calumet. This weird echo — Calmette, Calumet — wasn’t the only thing that made the grim news out of Cambodia resonate eerily with a tragic event from our own past.

Both stampedes took place during holiday celebrations: in Cambodia, it was during Bon Om Tuk, an annual water festival; in Calumet, it was Christmas Eve. There are all sorts of parallels in the accounts of eyewitnesses and all sorts of ways in which the pictures out of Cambodia and Calumet illuminate one another. The photograph the New York Times ran on its front page yesterday offers a horrifying glimpse into what it must have been like for those who died in the chaos in Calumet. A photograph of the bridge the day after the stampede, with its shoes and holiday favors, reminds me of the pictures I’ve seen of the day after the 1913 stampede. And then there are the pictures of the dead. We have all seen photographs of mass executions, bodies thrown into ditches and body parts strewn around battlefields; but only this kind of panic – people trampling and crushing the very people with whom they were just celebrating, a whole tangle of limbs and bodies, twisting and writhing, people suffocating and having the life squeezed out of them — produces a gruesome stack of corpses. Stacked “like cordwood” is how they put it in Calumet.

And as powerful as these images are, they still don’t tell us much about what really happened. It’s up to us to put together a story. And that is where things start to get a little more complicated.

We know the trouble in Calumet took place during a strike that virtually shut down Michigan’s copper range from the summer of 1913 through the winter of 1914. On December 24th, the striking miners had gathered with their wives and children for a holiday party in a building called the Italian Hall.

The party was on the second floor, in a big room the Ladies Auxiliary had decorated for the occasion. There were about 500 people in the Hall. As the children were lining up to get their presents from Santa, someone – to this day, nobody knows who – yelled fire! Panic took hold of the crowd, and in the ensuing chaos, 74 people were crushed to death on the stairway of the Italian Hall. 59 of the dead were children.

Woody Guthrie, whose song about the trouble in the Italian Hall inspired our film, has it that the mining company hired “thugs” and “scabs” to enter the hall, raise the cry of fire, and then hold the doors of the Italian Hall shut. Most historians and many people in Calumet nowadays take issue with his account of the “massacre” at the Hall, especially with that last detail about the doors; and the provenance of the story reveals its undeniable bias: Woody learned the story from labor organizer Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor, who was in Calumet during the strike, working with the Western Federation of Miners.

But the power of Woody Guthrie’s song doesn’t lie in its historical accuracy. It’s a heartbreaking story, simply told; and it situates the trouble at the Italian Hall in the strike, in the deep social and political divisions that ran through Calumet in 1913 and still, to a certain extent, have a claim on the telling of Calumet’s story today. Those very divisions – and misguided ideas about how to heal them or erase them – may, in fact, have been behind the town’s razing of the Italian Hall in 1984.

What social and political tensions may have precipitated the disaster in Cambodia, or may now be playing a role in the recounting and representation of that disaster, is not so easily discerned from reports in the Western news media. But they are no doubt there, just beneath the surface. Take the holiday of Bon Om Tuk itself, the occasion of the disaster. It is an agrarian festival, celebrating the reversal of currents from the Tonle Sap to the Mekong at the time of the full moon; but it is also a celebration of padi state power, with demonstrations of naval prowess held in front of the Royal Palace, and official histories dating the festival back to the 12th century and the martial exploits of King Jayavarman VII. On the one hand, farmers are celebrating the harvest and fertility of the land; it is a kind of Thanksgiving. On the other, the state is demonstrating its power and hearkening back to a time when it dominated the Mekong.

The official story of this Bon Om Tuk has not yet been written, but it is already beginning to eclipse other accounts and put an end to dangerous and possibly subversive speculation. For instance, what caused all those people to panic? A Times report simply answered with “unclear.” A day later, the BBC went a little further than that, saying “the cause of the panic was not immediately apparent. Electric shocks from the lights, fights among young people and fears that the structure was about to collapse have all been put forward.” In a CNN report, “the municipal police chief” offers his own “likely” explanation — “a suspension bridge packed with people began to sway, creating panic” – but that same report goes on to quote Steve Finch, a journalist with the Phnom Penh Post:

Finch said police began firing water cannon onto a bridge to an island in the center of a river in an effort to get them to continue moving across the bridge.
“That just caused complete and utter panic,” he told CNN in a telephone interview. He said a number of people lost consciousness and fell into the water; some may have been electrocuted, he said. Finch cited witnesses as saying that the bridge was festooned with electric lights, which may have played a role in the electrocutions.

Finch’s own paper today says that the cause of the panic “remains unclear,” and reports that the government — which now deniesthat anyone was electrocuted — has “established a special ‘investigation subcommittee’ made up of police and officials from the Ministry of Justice to probe the causes of the tragedy.” This is in response to criticisms leveled at the government by the Asian Human Rights Commission. Whether this subcommittee will get any closer to the truth is hard to say. A Congressional inquiry into the Italian Hall disaster in 1914 certainly did not.