On July 12th, 1917, over a thousand striking mineworkers and their supporters were kidnapped and illegally deported from Bisbee, Arizona, in one of the largest vigilante actions in American history. In Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands, historian Katherine Benton-Cohen treats the episode as a critical moment in the historical creation of racial boundaries, one that the town of Bisbee is now marking with a series of events and conversations aimed at shaping a public reckoning with these issues that so obviously still vex the nation. Below, Benton-Cohen considers the “Bisbee Deportation” and the discussions now taking place around its centennial.
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It’s 5am. Someone is pounding at your door. He’s got a gun, and he’s demanding your husband, brother, or son. You argue. But then you look out the window: hundreds of men are fanning out across your mountain town. They carry rifles and wear white armbands. The ones at your door grab your man and pull him out. He becomes one of 1,200 men rounded up by the gunmen and marched two miles to the local ballpark, where the whole town—children, old folks, miners, merchants—has gathered to watch. The captured are loaded onto a train bound for the middle of nowhere in New Mexico.
Most of the husbands and sons never return. Soldiers house and feed them for nearly two months at an army camp leftover from Pancho Villa’s raids. Back at home, armed men guard the town limits to prevent their re-entry. A local charity gives wives and children food and one-way tickets out of town. Eighty percent of the men thrown out of town are immigrants—from Mexico, but also from places like Slovenia, Italy, Finland, Montenegro, and Greece. The popular county sheriff, Harry Wheeler, has deputized nearly 2,000 men to help him with the roundup. He reportedly asks each captured man, “Are you an American or are you not?”
A century ago today, this event unfolded under the blazing July sun of Bisbee, Arizona, eight miles from the Mexico border. It became known across the country—on the front page of the New York Times—as the “Bisbee Deportation.”
What were the deported men’s crimes? In late June, the radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, as they were known, had called a strike in one of the nation’s most important copper-mining towns, Bisbee, Arizona. Mexicans were not allowed to work in the well-paying underground jobs, and earned about half of what other workers did, even when performing similar jobs. The differences were written into company pay scales, which listed “Mexican” and “white” wages. The strike demands included nearly equal wages for Mexican workers. A few townspeople reported threats of violence from the strikers, but the town had remained remarkably calm. But the strike dragged on: Walter Douglas, the president of Phelps Dodge, the largest copper-mining company in town (and one of the largest in the world), vowed that he would never “negotiate with rattlesnakes.” The United States had entered World War I three months earlier, and the Mexican Revolution had churned on for seven years; copper sheathed Allied bullets, and border county sheriffs were not in a friendly frame of mind toward anti-war activists like the Wobblies, much less Mexico or Mexicans.
Under public pressure, President Woodrow Wilson created a federal mediation commission to investigate. Among the appointees was a young Harvard Law School professor named Felix Frankfurter. He was appalled by what he found in Bisbee. He spent the evenings wandering the canyon streets with a Catholic priest and contemplating evil. The strikers, Frankfurter observed, “feel they were not treated as men.” Theirs was a “fight for the status of free manhood.” The federal commission concluded the deportation was “wholly illegal,” but no one was ever convicted.
Fast forward a century. This month, in a time of divisive politics and resurgent nativism, the town of Bisbee is reckoning and remembering. Artists, scholars, local historians, retired miners, and Wobblies (yes, there are a few left) are holding book talks, art installations, museum exhibits, and a symposium on the event. A documentary film crew is chronicling the event, staging guerrilla re-enactments, and interviewing local people on their family stories and perspectives—pro and con. The town is plastered with posters advertising discussions and debates about a day that people in Bisbee did not discuss for decades. Many people are talking openly about that day—which literally divided the community—for the first time.
Bisbee is an unusual place, as are the commemorations it is hosting. A lot has happened since 1917. The Deportation broke the unions in town until the Wagner Act in 1935. The county seat moved from Tombstone—yes, that one—to Bisbee in 1929. Phelps Dodge dug a massive open-pit mine, Mexican workers worked for wage parity by unionizing and filing federal discrimination claims, and the mines finally closed in 1975. Hippies trickled in, picking up charming Victorian mining shanties for pennies on the dollar. The next four decades were a long detente between retired miners and the newcomers, who eventually realized both needed each other for the town to survive. It is mostly white, and fiercely liberal. Guns and border policy have deeply divided the county’s residents. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the county’s eighty-mile border with Mexico became the number-one site for apprehension of undocumented immigrants. It is the birthplace to the Minutemen militia. Political divisions have only deepened since the unsolved 2010 murder forty miles from Bisbee of the border rancher Robert Krentz, the subsequent passage of Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law SB 1070, and the 2011 shooting of Bisbee’s member of Congress, Gabrielle Giffords. I am here in Bisbee for the commemorations. Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Honk if you hate gun control,” and this morning another one that said, “No Border Wall.”
“Are you an American, or are you not?” The question is still everywhere. Everyone in Bisbee knows someone who has been deported—for real this time, to Mexico. Meanwhile, someone has been posting flyers on telephone poles and bulletin boards all over town. They say “NO MORE ROUNDUPS, 1917-2017.”
