Tag Archives: thugs

Labor Day, 2013: Will Big Mining Do Better This Time Around?

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On Labor Day, I’ll be in New York City, so I won’t be able to see the television broadcast premiere of 1913 Massacre on Twin Cities Public Television. How many will tune in? How will the broadcast cut of the film look and play on TV? Above all, I wonder, what connections will the Labor Day TV audience draw between 1913 and 2013? My comments here run this holiday weekend on MinnPost.

Many people Ken and I met in mining towns around Lake Superior while filming 1913 Massacre urged us to see the positive contributions the mining companies had made to the region. Some insisted that the Woody Guthrie song that had introduced me to the story of the Italian Hall disaster and brought me to Calumet and the Upper Peninsula in the first place had gotten it all wrong. The greedy bosses, company thugs and violent social strife that Woody sang about in “1913 Massacre” did not fit the story they knew. “We all got along just fine,” they protested.

When the mines were running, the towns thrived. The big department stores downtown were open. The churches (and the bars) were packed to capacity. Everybody worked hard and the work was sometimes dangerous, but on Saturday nights, the streets were jammed and the atmosphere festive. The company put a roof over your head then sold you the house at terms you could manage. The copper bosses built libraries, sidewalks and schools, gave land grants for churches, and even furnished luxuries like bathhouses and public swimming pools. The men who ran the mines weren’t just robber barons from Boston; they were public benefactors.

But there were limits to their benevolence. The mining captains regarded the immigrant workers – Finns, Slavs, Italians — as charges placed in their paternal care. They knew what was best for these new arrivals. They discouraged organizing. Faced with strikes on the Iron Range in 1907 or on the Keweenaw in 1913, they adamantly refused to negotiate, brought in scabs to do the work and Waddell and Pinkerton men to deal (often brutally) with the strikers. Even after the tragic events of 1913, Calumet and Hecla Mining Company would not recognize the union for decades.

The Keweenaw miners were on strike again in 1968 when C & H made a calculated business decision to pull out. No more jobs, pensions cut short; the good times were over. They left the waters poisoned and the landscape littered with industrial wreckage and toxic mine tailings.

The companies driving the new mining boom around Lake Superior these days promise to do better. They are dedicated to corporate social responsibility. They practice “sustainable” mining, tout their environmental stewardship and declare their respect for human rights. They have community outreach programs and promise to make substantial, long-term investments in the economic development of the regions where they come to mine. They work closely – some would say too closely – with regulators to create environmental impact statements and plan for responsible closure of their mines. They are eager to gain social license.

For the most part, these big multinationals operate with the support of organized labor and politicians who want to create jobs — and what politician doesn’t want to do that? But the high-paying, highly-technical mining jobs are unlikely to go to local residents; and the new mining is likely to have detrimental effects on local economies, as the economist Thomas M. Power has shown in studies of Michigan and Minnesota. Mining may provide some short-term jobs, but it can also drive away creative professionals and knowledge workers, destroy entrepreneurial culture, diminish quality of life and damage long-term economic vitality.

So promises of good times and plentiful jobs need to be treated with circumspection. Polymet has repeatedly scaled back its job predictions for its huge, open-pit sulfide mining project near Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota, and the company’s own figures suggest that only 90 of the promised 360 jobs – just 25% — will go to local communities. Local is, moreover, a relative term. Mine workers today tend not to live in mining towns; they will commute an hour or more to work. And hiring will always be subject to swings in metals prices, which are now dependent on two new factors: continued Chinese growth (and urbanization) and the entry of big financial firms into metals warehousing and trading.

There are limits to big mining’s benevolence as well. The last time I flew into Marquette airport, a glossy Rio Tinto poster advertised the company’s commitment to “build, operate and close Eagle Mine responsibly.” Nobody had bothered to take the sign down after Rio Tinto had done an about-face and sold Eagle, a few months earlier, to Vancouver-based Lundin Mining for dimes on the dollar. Rio Tinto’s commitments lasted only until it was time to flip their property. Overnight, Eagle Mine had become a “non-core asset” and the surrounding community none of Rio Tinto’s responsibility.

In Wisconsin, Gogebic Taconite has drawn the line between company and community much more starkly, with help from a paramilitary firm called Bulletproof Securities. Black-masked guards, dressed in camouflage and armed with semi-automatic weapons, protect the mining company’s property from trespassers and environmental protesters. Imagine what they might do in the event of a strike.

gogebicguard

Bulletproof Securities patrols Gogebic Taconite’s property in northern Wisconsin.

A Note on Thug Life

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Thug enters the English language in the early 19th century as an import from colonial India. The original thugs, or thagi, were itinerant bands of thieves and marauders who strangled their victims to death. The practice was known as P’hansigár, from the Hindustani word P’hánsí, noose.

The methods of the thug are described by James Arthur Stevenson in an 1834 paper that he read before the Royal Asiatic Society:

The chief object in view is to lull their victim into a sense of security before they proceed to deprive him of life, which is…always effected by strangulation. When a favorable opportunity presents itself, one of the party throws a noose, which is made with a tightly twisted handkerchief, round the destined sufferer’s neck; an accomplice immediately strikes the person on the inside of his knees, so as to knock him off his legs, and thus throw the whole weight of his body on the noose; and a very few seconds puts an end to the unfortunate man’s struggles.

The victim would be buried and the booty sent back home.

Other writers at the time remark on how expert the thugs are in the art of deception, false friendship and smooth talk. Lawrence James, who describes the work of these “inveiglers” in Raj, says that “deception” (and only incidentally robbery and murder, I suppose) was “their trade.” Stevenson called them “the most decided villains that stain the face of the earth”; and by 1855, a British civil servant urged that the thugs ought to be considered “an infernal machine beneath the keel of the good ship government,” subversive to civilizing measures of the British colonial project.

And indeed they were, not just because they created mayhem and committed murder, but because the practice of thugee was, to use a fancy word for it, incommensurable with the moral outlook of the colonizers.

Thug life was governed by ritual and devotion to the goddess Kali. The corpses of victims were stabbed; the stabbing may have once involved more elaborate rituals of sacrifice. It seems, from British accounts, the thugs regarded their murders not as crimes but almost as a perfectly legitimate trade into which they were born, as the son of a blacksmith might regard work at the forge. They talked about themselves almost as members of a social caste.

When they were apprehended,

the thugs were unmoved by their fate; in one instance several under sentence of death sung cheerily on their way to the scaffold and hung themselves rather than die at the polluted hands of an executioner who was a leather dresser.

A correspondent named James Paton interviewed a band of captured thugs in 1836 and was shocked by the “relish and pleasure” with which they confessed to horrible crimes. They took pride in good kills, and did not venture out without performing oblations and ablutions and reading omens. They were hunters of men.

European accounts of thugs, beginning with Jean de Thévenot’s late seventeenth-century Voyages, would make a fascinating study in the “documentary” aspect of early anthropology. In the 1850s, the Italian photographer Felice Beato photographed a group of four thugs demonstrating the use of the P’hánsí. I found what I believe is a copy on Mike Dash’s site.