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The Italian Hall disaster was a tragedy that occurred on December 24, 1913, in Calumet, Michigan. A miner's strike had been in force since July, and a Christmas party was held for the children of strikers on the second floor of Italian Hall. About 675 people were in attendance when a false cry of "fire" was heard, leading to a panicked escape down the main stairway. Over seventy people, mostly children, died in the stampede, making it the worst disaster by lives lost in the history of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

A number of questions regarding the disaster have never been fully resolved, despite a coroner's inquest and a congressional investigation. Estimates of the death toll have ranged from seventy-one to over eighty. The person who cried "fire" was never officially identified. A number of theories as to why so many died in the stairway have been proposed, including doors that opened inward or that were held shut.

The disaster has been commemorated in a variety of ways including song, literature, opera, and film. Italian Hall was demolished in 1984 and the doorway arch was incorporated into a memorial park on the site.

Background
In 1909, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) established a presence in the Copper Country of Michigan and by 1913, the federation had five local unions and almost nine thousand members. However, the mines refused to recognize the union. Beginning in 1912, union members expressed dissatisfaction with wages, hours, working conditions, and the use of a one-man drill in place of a two-man drill. However, the union was not sufficiently organized at the time and delayed striking. The union's Denver offices urged the local unions to not strike until April 1914, but the union members were so insistent that more immediate action was taken.

During the first twelve days in July 1913, a referendum was held as to whether a conference with the managers of the local copper mines should be demanded and whether a strike should be held if either a conference or concessions were refused. According to the WFM, 98% of its members voted in favor of each proposal. On July 14, 1913, the local district union of the WFM sent a letter to the manager of each of the local copper mines expressing its dissatisfaction. The letters requested replies by July 21 for a meeting with the union no later than July 28, otherwise a strike would be called. The Quincy Mining Company returned the letter unopened and no other company replied. On July 22, the union met and called a strike that went into immediate effect. Most mines began striking the morning of July 23, though some did not begin until the night shift. Except for two non-unionized mines at the southern edge of the Copper Country, all the mines were on strike the morning of July 24, encompassing over 14,000 employees.

In the days immediately after the strike commenced, there was much rioting in the area. Around 2 a.m. on July 24, the Houghton County sheriff requested two thousand troops from Governor Woodbridge Ferris to quell disorder. The governor deployed the entire Michigan National Guard to the area—over 2500 troops. They arrived by July 27 and camped in tents on mine property. The arrival of the National Guard quelled the violence until August when some mines resumed partial operation. On August 14, two men were killed in the Seeberville Affair, an incident which reenergized the strike and lead to greater violence; outbursts of violence continued throughout the strike.

Disaster
By Christmastime, the strike had been in effect for five months. In an attempt to improve morale, the Women's Auxiliary of the WFM arranged a Christmas party for the children of strikers to be held at Italian Hall on December 24, 1913. Anna Clemenc, president of the Women's Auxiliary, was in charge of the entertainment. For the party, $25 was donated from miners in New Jersey, $64 from the local community, and $57.25 from the local union. The party featured candy, a Mother Goose play, and a striker who volunteered to be Santa Claus. The three Christmas trees were decorated with crêpe paper and ten cents' worth of tinsel.

About five hundred children and one hundred seventy five parents were in attendance in the second-floor hall. The stairway that led from the second-floor hall to the street was 5 ft wide and passed through doors on the main level. The hall also had two fire escapes. In late afternoon, the children were lined up to receive presents when the cry of "fire" was heard. Even though there was no fire, they rushed down the staircase in an attempt to escape and those at the bottom died under the crush of people. The majority of those who died were children. After the stampede subsided, a crowd gathered outside and began to remove bodies from the stairway; they were piled next to the building and quickly counted.

Coverage
The disaster received widespread coverage, appearing in newspapers such as The New York Times, the Boston Daily Globe, The Atlanta Constitution, The Evening Independent, and The Toronto World. Local photographer J.W. Nara documented the aftermath of the disaster, and is the only one known to have gotten into the building on December 24. His photographs were distributed as stereoviews dual-captioned in English and Finnish and as postcards. "The Italian Hall Disaster in Pictures" was a compilation of eleven of his photographs of the event. The funeral procession was filmed by a Chicago man; newsreels of the funerals were shown in Chicago as a WFM fundraiser.

Funerals and burials
A ballroom above the Red Jacket Town Hall (in the same building as The Calumet Theatre) served as a temporary morgue before the bodies could be buried. Lakeview Cemetery, located west of town, was chosen as the burial site as it was not owned by the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. Funerals and memorial services were held at six churches. Four bodies were buried on December 27 and the rest on December 28. The mass funeral procession on December 28 ran a 2 mi course; it was led by Anna Clemenc and thousands of people lined the route. The disaster taxed the local supply of caskets, requiring more to be shipped to Calumet.

Death toll
The precise number of dead has never been fully determined. In the days immediately following the disaster, the death toll varied widely from day to day and between different news sources. On December 25, The New York Times reported that after the bodies were pulled from the stairway, a quick count identified that seventy-four had died with the likelihood that up to a dozen others had been carried away. The Evening Independent reported the death toll was eighty-three. The next day, The New York Times reported that the official count was seventy-two. In 1914, a congressional investigation concluded that seventy-three people had died.

Later, in 1975, a Historic American Buildings Survey report stated that the best estimate at the time was seventy-four, though accounts of the death toll have ranged from seventy-one to over eighty. A total of seventy-four has appeared in National Park Service literature. The 2005 book False Alarm by Peggy Germain reproduced seventy-three death certificates for victims of the disaster. The Michigan State Historic Preservation Office also reports that there were seventy-three victims and the number is displayed on their informational marker.

No matter the exact death toll, it was the worst disaster ever by lives lost in the Keweenaw Peninsula. By comparison, the worst mining accident was the Osceola Mine fire on September 7, 1895, which killed thirty people. Despite the high number of dead, only about five people suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Those caught in the rush were either crushed to death or held upright and safe by the force of surrounding people.

Strike and union
Public support for the strikers increased significantly following the disaster at Italian Hall. Within a day, $25,000 was raised for the families of victims; however, many members of the relief committee were members of the anti-union Citizens' Alliance. The union laid blame for the cry of "fire" on an unknown member of the Citizens' Alliance; some unionists even believed the Alliance had barred the doors. All fifty-four families eligible for aid rejected it, with the president of the WFM, Charles Moyer, stating that the "union will bury its own dead." Luke Grant, an investigator for the Commission on Industrial Relations, saw this as a missed opportunity for the union to leverage public sympathy into forcing negotiations with the mine companies.

On the evening on December 26, Moyer was with WFM auditor Charles Tanner in a room at the Hotel Scott in Hancock. The sheriff called Moyer with an offer of protection, followed by a group inquiring about his rejection of the relief money. Around 8 pm, the two were come upon by armed "thugs" employed against the union. There was a struggle and Moyer was shot in the back. He was dragged over a mile to the railroad station in Houghton, and forcibly boarded at gunpoint onto a train with Tanner in what was called a "deportation". He arrived in Chicago around 1 pm on December 27, where he sought medical attention. After this incident, support for the strike and the WFM declined. The strike ended in April 1914 without achieving any tangible gains.

Investigations
Houghton County coroner William Fisher held an inquest into the disaster at the Red Jacket town hall. The inquest ran from December 29 through December 31, to which he called seventy witnesses. He delivered his verdict on December 31, which read in part:

...that the cause of death of the above-named persons was by suffocation, the same being caused by being jammed on the stairway leading to the entrance of the Italian Hall, where a Christmas celebration was being held under the auspices of the Woman's Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners, and the stampede was caused by some person or persons within the hall, unknown to the jury at this time, raising an alarm of fire within the hall, and we further find that no person or persons was allowed inside of the hall where the celebration was being held without producing a union card or having some member of the union vouch for them before they be allowed admittance. We further find by the evidence that the citizens, doctors, firemen, and the sheriff's force are to be commended for their prompt action in their efforts to relieve the suffering.

Despite the certainty conveyed by the verdict, union membership was not checked later in the day. Because unionists strongly believed that pro-company groups were responsible for the disaster, the coroner was anxious to absolve them of involvement.

On January 27, 1914, the United States House of Representatives passed House Resolution 387, directing the Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the conditions at the coal mines in several counties in Colorado and the copper mines in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan. The investigation was to determine whether a system of peonage was in place, whether the postal service was being disrupted, whether US immigration laws were violated, whether arrests and judicial proceedings occurred illegally, whether the law was violated regarding the production, sale, and transportation of copper, whether shipments of firearms and explosives were made to prevent the interstate trade of copper, and to determine the causes of such conditions. Subcommittees were dispatched to Colorado and Michigan; the investigation of Michigan's copper mines began early February in Hancock. On March 7, 1914, the subcommittee took testimony regarding the Italian Hall disaster in the armory in Red Jacket. Witnesses were offered interpreters if they could not speak English. Twenty witnesses testified, some of whom swore that the man who first raised the cry of "fire" was wearing a Citizens' Alliance button.

In his book Death's Door, Steve Lehto criticized the handling of the inquest, stating that it "was botched worse than any other legal proceeding of its sort in Michigan." However, he praised the congressional investigation of the Italian Hall disaster as "a well-run hearing".

Explanations for the disaster
Major questions exist about the source of the cry of "fire" and how people could become trapped and die in a stairwell. To the latter point, a number of explanations have been put forward, including the simple one that too many people jammed into too small a space. A professor at Northern Michigan University stated in 2010 that "The question of what really happened has entered the realm of folklore." Shortly after the disaster, the building's architect, Paul H. Macneil, said that an actual fire would have been less disastrous as the crowd would have spread to multiple exits instead of concentrating at the main stairway.

Source of the cry of "fire"
One of the unresolved questions regarding the disaster is the identity of the person who cried "fire", or whether there was such an alarm. Twenty-six witnesses testified at the coroner's inquest that they heard a man cry "fire". Seven reported that he was wearing a button and three identified it as belonging to the Citizens' Alliance. However, fourteen witnesses at the inquest did not see any button. Some witnesses reported that they never heard a cry of "fire". Hoagland suggests that someone may have actually cried for water, which in Croatian sounds very similar to the word for fire.

In 1982, Leslie Chapman of Calumet related a story he had heard in Butte, Montana, of a man who, on his deathbed in 1924, confessed that he and another man "were both single men and drunk and thought we'd have some fun. As we walked by the hall we decided to holler fire and watch the people come down. We didn't know it would turn out bad. We both left town afterward."

Doors held shut
Shortly after the disaster, the union charged that deputies employed by the mine companies held the doors shut. The theory first appeared in a December 26 publication of the Finnish-language newspaper Työmies. At the coroner's inquest, however, only two witnesses reported that the doors had been held shut by deputies while sixteen testified to the contrary.

Inward-opening doors
In 1952, C. Harry Benedict published Red metal: the Calumet and Hecla story, a company-authorized history of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. In the book, he posited that inward-opening doors at the base of the stairway prevented escape and led to the disaster. The explanation is widely accepted: it was included on the Michigan State Historic Site marker, was repeated in The Daily Mining Gazette as late as 1982, and was accepted as fact in a 2007 book on egress design. The popularity of the idea is partly due to its logical explanation of how so many people could have died. However, no contemporary sources make any mention that the doors opened inward. None of the witnesses at the coroner's inquest stated that the doors opened inward, nor did the two union publications, and the then procompany The Daily Mining Gazette specifically stated that the doors opened outward.

Alison Hoagland suggested that the belief that the doors opened inward may have originated from a misleading stereoview of the doorway published shortly after the disaster. The image shows two doors, one that opens inward and the other outward, that appear to share the same jamb. However, this arrangement is impossible since a third door leading to the saloon on the right side of the foyer would interfere with one of these doors. She further suggests that the door at the foot of the stairs was bifold.

Following the publishing of Death's Door in 2006, the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office began reviewing the evidence presented in the book to determine if the on-site marker needed correction regarding the direction the doors opened. In June 2013, the marker was modified to omit any mention of the doors or the direction they opened.

Italian Hall and site
From July 23, 1980, to April 14, 1988, Italian Hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The building was demolished in 1984, and in 1989, the site was made a memorial park and the doorway was re-erected on the property. Volunteer labor to create the park was provided by local union members. The doorway is adorned with brass plaques contributed by those who donated to the effort to create the memorial. Further into the lot is a Michigan State Historic Site marker which details the 1913 disaster on one side and the building's history on the other. There is a stone marker bearing a photograph of Italian Hall. In the rear, a Historical Women of Michigan marker about Anna Clemenc once stood, but it was removed at some point. , the park is owned by the village of Calumet and maintained by the Keweenaw National Historical Park (KNHP).

Songs
The song "1913 Massacre" was written by Woody Guthrie in the 1940s. He learned of the disaster after reading We are Many, the autobiography of Ella Reeve Bloor, who was present at Italian Hall. The song takes an unequivocal stance on the events, reflected in its title, by placing blame on "copper boss thugs" for crying "fire" and holding the doors shut.

Literature
In 2006, Steve Lehto published Death’s Door: The Truth Behind Michigan’s Largest Mass Murder. According to a 2007 review by Frederick Baker, Jr., the book "will surely prove to be, of the several that have been published, the definitive and authoritative account of that event." The book was named a Michigan Notable Book for 2007.

Film and theater
An opera about the disaster, titled The Children of the Keweenaw, was composed by Paul Seitz. Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, it debuted in 2001 at the Calumet Theatre. The creators of the opera recognized the disaster's unresolved nature, which is reflected in the work.

A film was also created about the disaster, titled "1913 Massacre", inspired by Guthrie's song. The idea for the film began about 2000, and filming took place from 2001 through 2006. The film focuses, not on the controversy of the disaster, but on the community and the memories associated with it.

Visual art
In the summer of 2000, a mural about the Italian Hall disaster was commissioned by the Copper Country Community Arts Council as one of three works of art about local history and culture. The mural, which measures 12 by, was created by Ed Andrzejewski and depicts "the screaming faces at the Italian Hall tragedy." It was put on display in St. Anne's Church in Calumet, but the group that administers the building requested its removal after a few days. Their stated reason was its large size, but its "cartoonish" and "flippant" style and the divisiveness of the event may have contributed to the removal. The mural was then displayed for several months in Hancock.

Centennial
Beginning as early as 2010, discussions were held on plans for commemorating the Italian Hall disaster during the centennial of the Copper Country Strike of 1913–1914. Some of the items under discussion included the appearance of the site and informing the public of the truth about the disaster. In October 2012, a travelling exhibit about the strike and disaster premiered at Michigan Technological University. Titled "Tumult and Tragedy: Michigan's 1913-14 Copper Strike", it was created by the Michigan Tech Archives and one of its twelve panels details the Italian Hall disaster. According to one the project managers, one of the more difficult aspects of putting together the exhibit was how to include the disaster without diminishing the rest of the strike. A ceremony commemorating the disaster was held June 20, part of FinnFest USA 2013, a celebration of Finnish culture that was hosted in Hancock.

Legacy
In his 1913 report to the governor of Michigan, the State Fire Marshall recommended that a law be passed "closing every upstairs theatre, opera house and place of amusement in Michigan," citing the Italian Hall disaster as a prominent example of their danger.

The disaster at Italian Hall was the most prominent event in the Copper Country Strike of 1913–1914. Under the assumption that the cry of "fire" was intentional, Steve Lehto has called the disaster "Michigan's largest mass murder." For many decades after the disaster, the events at Italian Hall were a taboo subject in the local area as the strike and disaster were highly divisive. The disaster was not taught in schools nor casually discussed. One resident indicated that, for some, there has been "a lingering fear of speaking out" against the mine companies even though they have long since discontinued operations. The tragedy has remained an "an open wound in the memory of the community" owing in part to the unresolved question of who perpetrated the event and the impossibility of punishment. The Historic American Buildings Survey report noted that "People speak of 'The Strike' and the disaster in the same manner that the searing memory of a presidential assassination holds the rest of the nation." According to Hoagland, one sign that there may be growing acceptance of what happened is the appearance of the topic in local school curricula around 2003.