Bisbee '17

by Robert Houston

Bisbee, Arizona, queen of the western copper camps, 1917. The protagonists in a bitter strike: the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, the toughest union in the history of the West; & Harry Wheeler, the last of the two-gun sheriffs. In this class-war western, they face each other down in the streets of Bisbee, pitting a general strike against the largest posse ever assembled. Based on a true story, Bisbee '17 vividly re-creates a West of miners & copper magnates, bindlestiffs & scissorbills, army officers, private detectives & determined revolutionaries. Against this backdrop runs the story of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, strike organizer from the East, caught between the worlds of her ex-husband—the Bisbee strike leader—& her new lover, an Italian anarchist from New York. As the tumultuous weeks of the strike unfold, she struggles to sort out what she really feels about both of them & about the West itself.

Genres: History, Literature

294 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've appreciated the I.W.W. since first reading about them, then hanging out in their Chicago headquarters, in high school. Unlike most other unions which sold out to capitalism, to wage slavery and class division, the Industrial Workers of the World, like Eugene Victor Debs, one of their founding members, were steadfast for the cooperative commonwealth and anarcho-syndicalism, steadfast even against the powers and principalities of the State: the police, the military, the courts, the vigilanties.

This novel captures the Wobblies at the pinnacle of their influence and illustrates the means by which they, and the hopes of ordinary people which they represented, were crushed.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful, character-driven historical novel that puts you in the middle of one of the most infamous labor disputes in American history: the forced deportation of nearly 1,200 striking miners in Bisbee, Arizona, in July 1917. This story is told in a series of vignettes focusing on several main characters — some real, like the I.W.W.-affiliated labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler, and some imagined, like the homegrown strike leader, Bo Whitley, who fights for better working conditions and also for Flynn's heart. The novel is at its best in re-creating life in a copper mining boom town during World War I, and the irreconcilable tensions between the striking workers and the nationalistic business and community leaders in Bisbee. Some of the plot devices are a bit contrived, such as a quickly-abandoned "love triangle" between Whitley, Flynn, and her real-life lover Carlo Tresca. But we are treated to a deep psychoanalysis of Sheriff Wheeler's possible thought process in the build-up to the Bisbee Deportation and a suspenseful description of the early-morning operation in the novel's final pages. Well worth reading for anyone interested in the early American labor movement or life in the Southwest when copper was king.

[Will Shetterly · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the review system had more options, I would give this four stars for technique and five for audacity. It's not a history--he puts some historical characters onto the scene who were not there--but it's a great use of fiction to present history that's often ignored.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the historical aspect of the book. Good insight into the IWW labor movement.