The Gibraltar: Socialism and Labor in Butte, Montana, 1895-1920.

The Gibraltar: Socialism and Labor in Butte, Montana, 1895-1920. By Jerry W. Calvert * Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1988. viii + 189 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $21.95.

Jerry Calvert has written an important local study demonstrating that many working people in the United States in the early twentieth century. "did not accept large-scale corporate enterprise as part of the natural order of things" (p. 146). By tracing the rise and decline of worker insurgency in Butte, Montana, from the Populist era of the 1890s until the Republican electoral landslide in 1920, he has shown that class conflict was no mere Marxist abstraction or "foreign" import but an ongoing reality. endemic to the American environment and conditions. In Butte, the world's leading center of copper mining and the base of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company's operations, many workers envisioned an alternative to industrial capitalism--a future that they themselves vaguely labeled the "Cooperative Commonwealth" or, more simply, socialism. Calvert's view of worker militance is similar to that offered by Melvyn Dubofsky in his study of Western radicalism in Labor History (1966) and an implicit refutation of views that attribute serious labor unrest to causes extraneous to the nature of corporate capitalism.

Calvert argues that Butte was the "quintessential worker city" (p. 4). In 1900 it was widely known as the "Gibraltar" of labor unionism because manual labor was the norm, and unions, which existed in all major industries there, were powerful enough to enforce closed shops. Nonetheless, the conservative Butte Miners' Union, founded by Irish miners in 1878, never became a vehicle for the rectification of working-class grievances, and dissatisfied miners turned to a variety of other organizations for redress.

Butte's workers" insurgency, consisting of a "revolutionary" wing and a "reform" wing, was never monolithic. It took on different but not mutually exclusive forms at different times. Having entered the arena of independent polities in the Populist era, unhappy workers subsequently founded alternative unions, joined the Socialist party, and successfully elected a Socialist mayor from 1911 to 1914, took part in "direct action" when the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) led three major strikes from 1918 to 1920, and participated in the postwar Nonpartisan League and farmer-labor coalitions in an effort to broaden their electoral base.

In this chronologically organized book, Calvert tells the story of the trials and tribulations of the workers' insurgency well. Beyond narrating events, his primary concern was to explain the reasons for the workers' failures and to assess the consequences. He concluded that the insurgents' respective attempts to achieve a more egalitarian society led them into costly internecine battles over divergent paths toward their goal, even as their struggles pitted them against intransigent corporate interests and government enemies. Anaconda fired Socialists, required overtime work on election day, "counted out" undesirable election returns, established an open shop and the "rustling card" system (a form of blacklist), hired spies and private detectives, and engaged in brutal tactics. Federal, state, and local authorities ...