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Lattimer Massacre 1897


Valin

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Lattimer Massacre

After close to two decades of comparative quiet, labor tensions in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields were again heating up. In the summer of 1897, the Hazelton Evening Standard in Luzerne County offered coal operators a blunt editorial warning: "The day of the slave driver is past and the once ignorant foreigner will no longer tolerate it."

Anthracite country had always drawn immigrants. By the 1890s, the coal fields were heavily populated by southern and eastern Europeans, who had come in hopes of claiming some portion of the American Dream. Pennsylvanians exhibited mixed feelings about these new arrivals. Newspapers celebrated the magnetic power of the state's industrial boom, but nativism, or anti-immigrant sentiment, was widespread against "foreigners" who refused to accept passively the low wages, dangerous work, and miserable living arrangements offered them by their employers.

lattimer.jpg

 

In the summer of 1897, a wave of spontaneous protests, organized by foreign-born workers, rippled through area mines. On the afternoon of September 10, some 400 immigrant miners, most of them eastern Europeans, raised an American flag and marched from Harwood towards the tiny patch town of Lattimer, where they hoped to convince Italian miners there to join the strike. On the outskirts of town they were met by Luzerne County Sheriff James L. Martin and 150 recently deputized Coal and Iron Police.

Called back from an Atlantic City vacation by the coal operators to end the strike, Martin had recently declared a state of civil disorder in order to deputize his posse, and then armed them with new Winchester rifles, metal piercing shells, and buckshot. As the marchers approached Harwood, Martin ordered them to disperse and attempted to grab their American flag. A scuffle ensued, someone yelled "Shoot the sons of bitches," and the deputies opened fire, killing nineteen unarmed miners and wounding thirty-two others.

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