By David Walsh 4 October 2002
An Injury to One, directed Travis Wilkerson, centers on a significant episode in American labor history, the murder of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana in August 1917. The film provides the historical background to the event, the decades-long exploitation of the region and its workers by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company.
The company's Butte operations provided 30 percent of the US copper total, and 10 percent of the world's, at a time when the need for the metal exploded thanks to its role in electrification. In 1917, provoked by low wages, dangerous conditions and reports of Anaconda's war profiteering, Butte's copper miners, organized in the Metal Mineworkers Union, walked off the job en masse. Socialist and left-wing tendencies had strong support within the city's working population.
Obviously a remarkable figure, Frank Little -- born to a white father and Cherokee mother in Oklahoma in 1879 -- had been a longtime activist for the left-wing IWW. As An Injury to One explains, shortly after his arrival in Butte, Little addressed 6,000 miners, denouncing the capitalist system and proposing a program of worldwide revolution by the working class. Ten days later he spoke to another meeting of 6,500, during which he termed President Woodrow Wilson a "lying tyrant," and called on workers to "abolish the wage-system and establish a socialist commonwealth."
Official Butte was outraged by Little's activities. On August 1 a gang of vigilantes, none of whose identities were ever learned, abducted the IWW organizer from his hotel room, drove outside of town and, after dragging him behind their car, hung him from a railway trestle. They pinned a note on him that read "3'-7'-77"," the dimensions of a grave in Montana. No one was ever arrested or convicted for Little's brutal murder.
Wilkerson's film also examines the present state of Butte, a much-decayed industrial city of some 32,000 people, blighted by the largest body of contaminated water in the US, the Berkeley Pit. This is the legacy of Anaconda, which abandoned the town decades ago. The company reportedly had extracted $25 billion worth of copper by that time.
Detective story writer Dashiell Hammett presumably based his fictional "Poisonville" in Red Harvest on Butte. Hammett, who worked as a Pinkerton detective from 1915 to 1922, claimed in interviews in later life that he had been offered $5,000 to take part in the murder of Little, a claim treated by many with skepticism.
The strength of Wilkerson's film, which suffers from occasional bouts of self-consciousness, is its seriousness and intelligence in the examination of a history that is almost entirely concealed by official sources. It is an unusual and sometimes quite moving effort. We spoke in Toronto....
The interview with Travis Wilkerson is available at <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/oct2002/wilk-o04.shtml>.] *****
***** _An Injury To One_ European Premiere at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival, <http://www.sidf.co.uk/programme/2002/films/an_injury_to_one.php>
dir: Travis Wilkerson USA 2002 53 mins colour/b&w 16mm
Travis Wilkerson's experimental documentary stylishly explores the turn-of-century lynching of union organiser Frank Little in Butte, Montana. Both a lament and a call for action, An Injury to One traverses between past and present, using archival material and computer techniques to paint a portrait of the effects of predatory mining practices on this small American town. Gold Prize, Big Muddy Film Festival.
Schedule 11.30am Thu 24 October 12.15pm Sat 26 October
About the director TRAVIS WILKERSON (b. Denver, USA, 1969)
FILMOGRAPHY Hands Or An Unfinished Song (1995/1997) Self PortraitŠ (1999) Accelerated Development: In The Idiom Of Santiago Alvarez (1999) National Archive V. 1 (2001)
Contact Up Front Films tel +1 669 0929 fax +1 734 668 4682 email upfrontfilms at earthlink.net www.extremelowfrequency.com ***** -- Yoshie
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