The 400 miners and immigrants who went on strike after a state tax on foreign labor cost them 3 cents a day, started marching through coal towns around Hazleton with American flags.
The 87 deputies, recruited by Luzerne County Sheriff James Martin, got their rifles from mine owner Calvin Pardee.
When they met in the village of Lattimer on Sept. 10, 1897, the deputies opened fire, 19 miners died on the spot and six of the wounded died later.
At the deputies’ trial, a prosecutor said the marchers were unarmed and peaceful. A defense attorney said the miners had clubs and swept through Lattimer like the Huns invading Europe. The jury took a half-hour to determine the shootings were justified by riotious conditions.
The national ripple
A year after the massacre, the direction of the United Mine Workers changed when Johnny Mitchell took over. Where the union had advocated for the Campbell Act that taxed immigrant miners before Lattimer, Mitchell truly united the mine workers.
“The coal you are mining is not Slavic coal. It is not Irish coal. It is not Polish coal. It is not Italian coal. It’s coal. You are all working under the same conditions,” he said.
Under Mitchell, the union won concessions during a strike in 1900 and the “great” strike that lasted 163 days in 1902. Miners gained a nine-hour day and $10-a-day raises from an arbitration panel that President Theodore Roosevelt called for.
The 1902 strike was historic not only because the miners won a victory against ardently anti-union owners, but for the first time they had backing of the United States government and the public, which had sympathy for the fallen miners, anthropologist Paul Shackel writes in “Remembering Lattimer.”
Living legacy
Shackel, whose students from the University of Maryland have done archaeological digs at Lattimer, said Lattimer wasn’t remembered, at least officially, until years after the massacre.
It was as if the community had amnesia.
Although money was set aside to build a monument for the victims within a decade, no memorial rose until the 75th anniversary.
A marker recounts the historic Lattimer Massacre. (John Haeger / Staff Photographer)
“For God’s sake, let there be no more Lattimers,” Cesar Chavez said at the monument’s dedication in 1972 when he traveled to Lattimer from California and called for unity among workers.
Chavez said the miners were from other nations, had strange-sounding names and suffered harsh working conditions, just like the United Farm Workers he represented. This year, Chavez’s reputation crumbled after women whom he had sexually abused for years told their stories to The New York Times. Communities began removing the name of Chavez, who died in 1993, from streets, buildings and festivals while continuing to celebrate the progress of farmworkers.
Sidelight
In Hazleton, Shackel also chronicled a more recent backlash against foreign workers, including the city’s 2006 Illegal Immigration Relief Act, aimed at Hispanic people who took jobs in meat plants and distribution centers.
“If we can commemorate the struggle of the immigrants who came here more than a century ago,” Shackel writes in “Remembering Lattimer,” “I believe we also can appreciate the heritage and social values of the contemporary immigrant.”
About the series
No. 6: As the nation approaches America250, we are counting down ways NEPA has powered American history. Missed a day? Read the full countdown as it unfolds at citizensvoice.com.