On July 12, 1917, in the copper-mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, one of the largest illegal mass deportations in American history was carried out against striking workers. The IWW’s Metal Mine Workers’ local had struck the Phelps Dodge copper mines for safer conditions, an end to discriminatory pay, and fairer work rules — vital war production that made the strike a national issue.
At dawn, a posse of some 2,000 armed vigilantes, deputized by the county sheriff and organized by Phelps Dodge, rounded up around 1,200 striking miners and sympathizers at gunpoint. They were herded into cattle and boxcars and hauled nearly 200 miles into the New Mexico desert, where they were abandoned without adequate food or water. No one was ever convicted for the deportation, which became a notorious example of corporate and state power crushing labor under the cover of wartime patriotism.