The saga of the Bisbee Deportation comes to an end. By 1920 everyone behind the illegal measure had gotten off scot free and by 1925 the Wobblies as an organization were pretty much dead. For all intents and purposes, Arizona was now in the hands of the copper companies.

Following the immediate aftermath of the Bisbee Deportation, we move into the weeks and months that followed and the response on a national level. It turned out to be just as anemic and apathetic as the local level.

In the aftermath of the Bisbee Deportation, the exiled men demanded help returning home, but were mostly met with apathy from officials. Meanwhile, Bisbee itself went into something of a paranoia-fueled lockdown.

After rounding up a couple thousand of their neighbors and acquaintances during the morning of July 12, 1917, the citizens of Bisbee held them at a local ballpark before stuffing the majority into the cattle cars of an eastbound train. About 15 hours later, the deported men founxd themselves abandoned, cold, thirty and starving in the middle of New Mexico.

On the evening of July 11, 1917, a group of roughly 100 men gathered at the Phelps Dodge medical dispensary to discuss what to do about striking miners in town. At 6:30 a.m. on July 12, these men and 1,900 more began a systematic program of arrests, beatings and thefts to round up any and all undesirables - whether they were participating in the strike or not.

Just two days before the eruption of the major historical set piece that is the Bisbee Deportation, a dress rehearsal of sorts was occurring in Jerome. And this smaller instance of vigilantism would show the copper companies exactly how much they could get away it.

In a fit of passion, the IWW decided to launch a strike in Bisbee in June 1917. Unfortunately, this just set up the dominoes perfectly for the copper companies to prepare their counterattack.

As we move into discussing one of the big black marks on Arizona history, we first must talk about Bisbee and that one time when the Western Federation of Miners was able to just barely gain a foothold in the company town.

After the U.S. entered World War I in the spring of 1917, another wave of strikes erupted across Arizona. But the owners of the state’s copper mines had learned a trick or two and were able to brand unions as anti-American agitators. Eventually the heavy hammer of company authority would fall everywhere , even in places as staunchly pro-labor as Globe and Miami.

As labor made its gains in the early 20th century, the companies they were agitating against embarked on a concerted campaign to co-opt, malign and marginalize any dissidents. One particular target was the IWW, which the companies soon managed to turned into villains in the public imagination, despite them doing very, very little.