So begins the song “1913 Massacre,” written by Woody Guthrie in 1941 after rea>ding about the Italian Hall tragedy that occurred in Calumet on Christmas Eve, 1913, where 74 people died in a stairway after an unidentified person shouted a false cry of fire.

These lyrics, in a later version sung by Guthrie’s son, Arlo, inspired filmmakers Ken Ross and Louis Galdieri to document the impact of the tragedy on the Copper Country community, both historically and currently. Wednesday night at the Calumet Theatre, the New York filmmakers presented a 13-minute sample of their intended piece, hoping to garner emotional and financial support for a full-length film.

“We heard the song and we were sort of captivated by this place,” Galdieri said. “We had to come, and we could see immediately by the wide streets that something big must have happened here, to have had that many people live here.” Over the next three years, Galdieri and Ross made four trips to the Copper Country, interviewing local residents and reviewing historical documents and photographs. “We had 80 hours of videotape that we cut down to 13 minutes for this preview,” Ross said. “It’s really just a small piece of what we want to do, and it could take many different avenues.”

Featuring a mix of black and white historical images and current footage of Calumet’s Sixth Street and Lakeview Cemetery, the film’s impact is supported by interviews with both local residents and more well-known faces. Wayne State University professor and Detroit-area poet M.L. Liebler refers to the tragedy as “representative of the social justice story, in that it can still make commentary today.” Various nationally-recognized musicians are interviewed, including Ani DeFranco and Arlo Guthrie himself, playing the song that inspired the film. Folk music legend Pete Seeger is featured, pointing out the poignancy between Guthrie’s lyrics and gentle melody, “This is not an angry melody,” Seeger says. “There’s a contrast between this tragic story set to this beautiful music.”

Following the viewing, the filmmakers solicited comments from the 150 people in attendance. Houghton resident Bill Fink cautioned the filmmakers not to base a historical documentary purely on the basis of Guthrie’s lyrics. “The song is not factually accurate,” Fink said. “Will you be balancing that out in the final film, perhaps offering testimony from the results of the Congressional hearing?” Regarding the identity of the person who shouted fire, referred to in Guthrie’s song as “the copper boss thugs,” but never proven, Paul Lehto added, “The film could be written to explore several scenarios and let the viewer decide what happened.”

Other residents thanked the filmmakers for their efforts and asked how the community at large could help. At that, Ross laughed, saying, “We’re from New York. There, nobody answers their phone. Here, we call up a guy and say, ‘Can we interview you? and he says, ‘Sure, come on over.’ It’s amazing.”   

Jim Lowell, Calumet Theatre executive director, echoed the comments of many who said the filmmakers should include Calumet within a larger context of world events. “We hear about the mining companies paying two dollars a day, but we need to have a better understanding of what the situation was not just here, but in other cities around the country.” Ross agreed, but said that Calumet was different from other cities Lowell mentioned in that “many of those cities have died out. Calumet is still hanging on.” At that, shouts came from the crowd that “Calumet has tenacity!” and “We love our area!”

“We noticed,” Galdieri replied.
“And we’re beginning to see why,” Ross added.

Ross and Galdieri can be contacted through their website at www.1913massacre.com.

Remembering a tragedy
Dale Killingbeck
The Grand Rapids Press.
Dec 28, 2003

Filmmakers tell story of mysterious Christmas Eve in Calumet that killed 74

Call it the remnants of a holiday turned horror day.


A brick arch in Calumet is all that remains of the place where, 90 years ago, great pain and sorrow befell an already suffering people.

The Italian Hall disaster.

On Christmas Eve 1913, about 700 people crowded into the second floor auditorium on Seventh Street to celebrate the holiday. Most of them were children.

Amid the merriment, something sparked a panic that led to a stampede for the exit and 74 deaths.

For Keweenaw Peninsula residents, questions about the disaster still can fire up a passion about the terrible blow inflicted upon striking mining families fighting the iron will of the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company. For those who live outside of the peninsula, there remains interest as well.

"I have people come in here every summer wanting to know where it is," says Sue Cone, comptroller for the village.
The "it" is the site and the arch, the same arch that held the doors where a wave of human bodies piled up from the first floor to the second.

Eye of the lens

Three years ago, a New York City filmmaker and historian came to see it with his camera and learn the story for himself. Louis Galdieri went back to New York and showed some footage to his filmmaker friend, Ken Ross. The clip included a woman Galdieri had stopped on the street and asked about the tragedy. She started crying. He learned how powerfully the tragedy is woven into the community.

"This story has an entire existence of its own," Galdieri says. "It's a whole subculture."

Ross immediately caught Galdieri's zeal to capture the story, the emotion surrounding it and the influence one version of the story has on history. The version was penned by folksinger Woody Guthrie. It's his song "1913 Massacre."

"I heard the song and got inspired to go out to Calumet," Galdieri explains .

"I first heard it sung by Arlo Guthrie."


Now, the filmmakers are raising funds to complete their project.

Calumet in 1913 was the village of Red Jacket. Immigrants from Croatia, Italy, Sweden, Finland and elsewhere spent up to 12 hours a day 1,000 feet or more into "copper country" mines chipping out the precious metal that was making Thomas Edison's invention available to the world.

However, mine owners realized the end was in sight, says Michigan Technological University history professor Larry Lankton. The Bureau of Mining was being formed, copper prices were falling and other regions of the country produced copper more cheaply. "It was the last hurrah of their running the world, and they knew that," Lankton says. "Nobody, not even the president, was going to tell the mining companies what to do."

Miners tired of long days, desiring more pay and worried about the safety of the new one-man drill, struck Calumet & Hecla in July 1913 after months of organizing by the Colorado-based Western Federation of Miners.

Anna Clemenc, wife of a Croatian miner, stepped up to help lead the effort against the mining bosses. She spent some time in jail for her efforts. A private detective agency from New York had been hired to protect mining property, and Gov. Woodbridge Ferris dispatched the Michigan National Guard to the city to protect the railroad and other vital interests.

As Christmas approached, Anna, better known as "Big Annie" organized a special Christmas celebration for the striking workers' families. On Dec. 24, children crowded into the auditorium that featured a five-foot stage and lined up in rows in front of it. As the audience looked up at the stage, they saw a beautiful tree on the right, decorated for the holiday.

"My grandmother, who was 13 at the time, wanted to go to the party," Cone says. "But her mother told her she couldn't go because they were bakers."

The program began. After songs and skits, the big moment arrived. Santa Claus walked onto the stage from wings with a big bag in his hand with goodies for the children. He stopped at stage center and raised his hand. Then something happened.

Papers the next day reported a man shouted: "Fire!"

The real cause is unclear; the result is known. Pandemonium. Chairs collapsing, children screaming and mothers and a few fathers grabbing infants and toddlers to head for the stairs and then down to the street. At the bottom of the stairs was the arch and two sets of double doors. One set opened in, and one set opened out. The doors that opened inward were shut.
Annie jumped up: "Everything is OK, sit down!"

But nobody listened. Despite valiant efforts by one woman to hold back the crowd and later a man caught in the current of flesh, wave after wave of bodies started falling down the steps and filling up the foyer below. Babies smothered. Adult hearts became pressed by the weight of the flesh pile until they burst.
Bodies blocked the doors.

Cone says a man came into her office shortly before the 75th anniversary of the incident, when the arch and memorial to the disaster were dedicated. Tears fell from his eyes. "He told me he wasn't going to come to the dedication because it was too painful to him," she recalls. "He had rushed to the stairs, and he was up to his waist in people and had to be pulled out."

The man told Cone he left the hall after his rescue and went to midnight Mass at a local Roman Catholic Church where he was an altar boy. The priest put his hand on his head and kept repeating: "You poor, poor boy."

Newspaper accounts at the time report the fire department arrived to find one woman standing on a window ledge with a baby, ready to leap. Firefighters quickly pushed her back inside after climbing a fire escape. Rescuers had to get at the pile from behind, or from the second floor, pulling bodies back into the auditorium.
When it was all over, 56 children, 13 women and five men were dead. There was no fire. And the great question fueled union anger.



Unanswered question

Who started it?

Was there a bearded man wearing a pro-mining company button who shouted through the upstairs doorway, as some alleged? One woman told reporters she sat next to a man whose son accidentally caught his hat on fire. And there are more stories -- all different and confused.
"I've come to the conclusion that there is no way to know what happened," Lankton says. "Eyewitness accounts are notoriously bad. Something caused a panic."
Galdieri, who has 70 hours of footage under his belt, agrees. "There are 30 different versions of this story," he says.

Sympathy for the bereaved families unified the village, and citizens began to raise funds and collect food and other necessities. But the union boss, Charles Moyer, refused any help, saying the union would take care of its own.

Funds started arriving anyway. Citizens met to form a committee to help those who had suffered a loss. When village representatives brought food, money and other aid to homes of those who lost loved ones, they refused.

A meeting was held with the union boss. He again refused to accept any aid. Shortly afterward, Moyer was visited by a group of men who escorted him out of the city. During the process, he was shot in the shoulder -- accidentally.

He was given a ticket to Chicago and told not to come back. He survived the gunshot.

Headlines across the nation spoke of the disaster and undoubtedly helped bring a congressional investigation of the mining strike and situation in the Calumet area.

In April, the mining company agreed to the eight-hour workday, and the strike ended. But many of the striking miners opted to leave the area for western mines or the auto factories downstate.

Guthrie's song puts the blame for the Italian Hall tragedy squarely on "copper-boss thugs." He wrote and recorded the song after reading about the incident in a socialist union organizer's biography in the 1940s.
Arlo Guthrie put the song on his "Hobo's Lullaby" album and Bob Dylan sang it at Carnegie Hall in 1961.

"It's a left-wing song and is therefore very predictable and very inaccurate," Lankton says. "Let's not take it for history."

However, the song still resonates. "Sure, everybody up here knows that song," Cone says.

Galdieri and Ross want to document how the song has influenced people's understanding of just what happened and how folk music transmits history.

"In a way, our film is about telling stories and passing them on," Ross relates.

During research at the Woody Guthrie Foundation, they also discovered a play Woody Guthrie wrote about the disaster.

They've interviewed Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger and two survivors to the disaster.Ross is an award-winning filmmaker and teaches film classes at Purchase College, near New York City. Galdieri is a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor turned filmmaker and has worked as a producer and writer on PBS projects.
They cannot predict when the film will be completed, but they want no doubt it will happen. "We are actively doing this," Galdieri says.


Remembering a Tragedy
By Olivia Bartlett
Daily Mining Gazette
December 14/15, 2002

Copper Country residents share stories of Italian Hall disaster for documentary

Take a trip with me in nineteen thirteen
To Calumet, Michigan, in the Copper Country.
I’ll take you to a place called Italian Hall
Where the miners are having their big Christmas ball.
— Woody Guthrie, “1913 Massacre”

CALUMET — Lyrics from folk musician Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” are the inspiration for a documentary about Calumet’s Italian Hall disaster.

The idea for the project began in 1999. After the song rattled around in New York filmmaker Louis Galdieri’s head for a few days, he decided to learn more. So he hopped a plane to the Upper Peninsula. “I was curious to see where Calumet, Michigan was,” Galdieri said. “I thought the story (in Guthrie’s song) was about Italians, but it turned out to be about people all over the world.”

On Christmas Eve 1913, copper miners of Finnish, Slavic, Italian, Irish, Hungarian and Cornish descent and their families gathered at the Italian Hall for a holiday party. After the party started, someone yelled “fire,” causing a mad rush down the stairs and to the door.

Seventy-four people stampeded to the exit and died as they suffocated or were crushed by people on top of them.

There was no fire.

Six months after first visiting Calumet and learning the story, Galdieri returned with filmmaker Ken Ross to make a documentary.

“When all is said and done, we hope to make a piece that will reach and move audiences all around the country, even around the world,” Ross said. “We think the story is that powerful.”

The men ended their second working trip to the Copper Country this week. They spent 11 days conducting personal interviews with victims, filming at Michigan Tech University’s Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections and researching oral history archives at Finlandia University. They even discovered a few who survived and are around to tell the story. On Wednesday, the crew visited Mary Butina of Painesdale, a daughter of a Croatian copper miner who worked for Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. Butina, 97, attended the party with her mother and four siblings.

Ross and Galdieri position a light, digital camera and monitor, morphing Butina’s living room into a studio. Ross operates the camera, while Galdieri holds a mic over Butina, who is eager to tell her story.

“A man yelled, “Fire. Fire. Fire,” she said. “Everyone was panicking ... they went down (the stairs) and pushed on the door, and some were suffering of suffocation.”

During the interview, Butina gestures with her hands to explain how the doors opened only one way — in. People became trapped as others behind them crowded the doors shut.

Some historians say, however, the door was held shut by “copper-boss thug-men,” as Guthrie writes in his song. The miners were on strike at the time.

Butina describes a roomful of miners, their wives and children darting toward the steps. She however, was told to do otherwise.

“Mother said, ‘I’m going to look around. Don’t move,’” Butina said. “She found a fire escape and got us out safely, then everybody followed. A lot more people would have been killed if Mom didn’t find the fire escape.”

The filmmakers seek stories, photographs and home movies for their documentary.

To hear the song that inspired the film, visit www.1913massacre.com.