Goldfield, Nevada

On December 4, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sent 300 Federal troops into Goldfield, Nevada under the command of Major General Frederick Funston, the butcher of the Philippines.  The mine owners of the district had informed Roosevelt that the area was in a state of anarchy and that martial law was required.  When the troops arrived they found Goldfield quiet, with no civil disorder or unrest at all.  But the mine owners took advantage of the presence of troops -- as they had planned -- to cut wages and declare that no union member would be allowed employment.

Roosevelt concluded that, although the troops had been brought in under false pretenses, he could not now remove them.  With the wage cuts and the move to break the union, he felt, there now would be civil unrest in the absence of troops.  The result: a non-union camp.

This is class warfare.  It doesn't matter that the President wasn't part of the plan from its inception.  It matters that he allowed the US Army to be used to destroy collective bargaining and to back the owners' play even when he realized that they had tricked him.  Goldfield was another exclusive camp, like Cripple Creek in the collection Stones from the Creek.  But neither the bosses nor Roosevelt were opposed to the union because they opposed discrimination.  We needn't make heroes of the miners in Goldfield to understand that the owners conspired with the US government to reduce them to interchangeable parts.

The owners have often created a multinational work force in a desire to divide their workers.  This shouldn't stop us creating a multinational resistance against them.  If we do not, we condemn ourselves to a continuation of the very one-sided class warfare that they have been waging for decades.