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The “Copper Collar”
The term “copper collar”, coined in the late 1800s, was a metaphor used to describe a person or a company directly influenced or controlled by the Anaconda Company. By 1920, the Anaconda Company owned several of the states newspapers including the Butte Post, the Butte Minor, the Anaconda Standard, the Daily Missoulian, the Helena Independent, and the Billings Gazette. . The Anaconda Company controlled the economic and political dealings throughout Montana well into the mid-1900s.

As the state’s largest employer, the Anaconda Company dominated Montana politics. In the political arena the "copper collar" symbolized influence, wealth, and power. In 1894, Montana held an election to decide which city would be its capital. Marcus Daly, an Anaconda supporter, used his power over the papers further his cause. While campaigning, “Anaconda’s supporters portrayed Helena as a center of avarice and elitism while promoting their choice as the pick of the working man. In return, Helena’s backers claimed that if the victory should go to their opponent the entire state would be strangled by the “copper collar” of Daly’s Anaconda Copper Mining Company.” Daly’s campaign was unsuccessful and Helena became the states capital. Flexing its political muscle again in 1903, the Anaconda Company closed down operations, putting fifteen thousand men out of work, until the legislature enacted the regulations it demanded. Montanans were angered by this decision and from that point forward to suggest that a politician “wore a copper collar” could cost him the election.

The "copper collar" symbolized oppression and control to the people of Butte. In the early 1900s, it was believed that Butte’s culture with its “perverse pride in its wide-open character was a response to the people’s belief in the all-encompassing power of the company. Butte’s bars, gambling dens, dance halls, and brothels were among the few public institutions not owned or controlled by Anaconda. It was not only the hazards of mining and the grim environment of Butte that propelled men and women to frenzied gaiety, but also the thought that here were arenas of self-expression denied them elsewhere in a city ringed by the “copper collar”.”

The "copper collar" symbolized different things to different people but one fact hold true, “the Anaconda Company used the tactics of an authoritarian state to quash a legitimate labor movement within its corporate fiefdom. That the press, an elemental part of democracy, was used in the assault marks a black period in the history of American journalism.” For decades Anaconda Company “mined and smelted metal, leveled forests, owned the newspapers, bribed the legislature, set the wages, murdered union organizers, exported the earnings, and finally shut down, leaving Butte and Anaconda the poorest cities in the states and the largest EPA Superfund site in the country.”