Cindi Spence

“In 1913, in the midst of this unprecedented prosperity, the copper miners went on a strike that lasted nine months and culminated in disaster. On Christmas Eve the strikers and their families gathered to keep their spirits up at Calumet’s Seventh Street Italian Hall. It had a saloon and an A&P store on the first floor and a spacious banquet room on the second, with a stage at one end. A crowd arrived for a holiday party it hoped would provide a little cheer during hard times. The party was in full swing when somebody yelled, “Fire!” The alarm was false, but the resulting panic was real. Because it was still commonplace for homes and buildings to burn to the ground within minutes, incinerating whoever was trapped inside, cooler heads could not prevail. The entire crowd ran to escape, but with only a pair of doors at one end of the hall, both of which opened inward, the more people pushed, the harder it became to open them. The screaming and shoving didn’t stop until nine men, eleven women, and fifty-three children had been crushed, suffocated, or both. The Calumet Town Hall served as a morgue for seventy-three casualties. “The union blamed the [mining] company for yelling, ’Fire!’ and vice versa,” local historian William John Foster said, “but to this day no one knows for sure.” The tragedy inspired a well-known limitation on free speech: It is illegal to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.”
― John U. Bacon, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald