In Memory of Frank Little, Labor Martyr

(Quote of the Week)

In the middle of the night of 1 August 1917, Frank Little was dragged from his bed, beaten, tied to the back of a car and dragged through the streets of Butte, Montana. His mangled body was found the next morning, hanging from a railroad trestle. He was killed by henchmen on orders from the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Little was a leading member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a revolutionary syndicalist organization whose best members, inspired by the October 1917 Russian Revolution, were won to communism. Little had gone to Butte to help organize the thousands of miners and electricians who were striking against the largest copper mining camp in the world. In the wake of his murder, the strikers extended their labor action and stood solid for six months in what was the only mass strike in a basic industry in the U.S. during the first interimperialist world war. We print below excerpts from a 1926 appreciation of Little by James P. Cannon, who was won to communism from the IWW and went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism.

Frank belonged to the “old guard” of the I.W.W. He was one of its founders. Before that he was one of the militants of the Western Federation of Miners. With a singleness of purpose possessed by few, he moulded his whole life’s activities around one central idea, the idea of the revolutionary struggle of the workers for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the workers’ society. Year after year, through storm and conflict, through strikes and struggles, through jails and prisons, he held resolutely to his chosen course to the end....

His hatred of exploitation and oppression and of all those who profited by it in one way or another was irreconcilable. He was always for the revolt, for the struggle, for the fight. Wherever he went he “stirred up trouble” and organized the workers to rebel. Bosses, policemen, stoolpigeons, jailers, priests and preachers—these were the constant targets of his bitter tongue. He was a blood brother to all insurgents, “to every rebel and revolutionist the world over.”...

Frank Little’s last speech, for which he paid with his life, was directed against the capitalist war. In that speech he set up his own doctrines against those of the warmongers. His philosophy, compressed into a single sentence, was picked up and carried all over the country on the telegraph wires with the news of his assassination. “I stand for the solidarity of labor.” This was the final message from that tongue of fire.

—James P. Cannon, “Frank Little, the Rebel” (Labor Defender, August 1926), reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958)