Frank Little was a Cherokee miner and IWW union organizer. He helped organize oil workers, timber workers, and migrant farm workers in California. Frank Little also participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” He also referred to World War I as a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
Little was born in 1879, in Illinois, to Dr. Walter R. and Almira Hays Little. In 1889, the family moved to Oklahoma to homestead. After his father’s death in 1899, Frank followed his miner brother, Walter, to California, where he too became a miner. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) formed in 1905. Frank Little joined the union soon after this. In 1914, he was elected to the union’s General Executive Board.
Fresno Free Speech Fight
In 1909, he helped lead the IWW free-speech fight in Fresno, California, over the right to organize agricultural workers from street corners. He spent nearly two years in prison for this. In one of the free speech fights, he was sentenced to a month in jail for reading the Declaration of Independence from a street corner.
Anaconda Strike and Lynching
In 1916, he was active in the Mesabi Range strike, in Minnesota, along with Carlo Tresca, Joe Ettor and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. And in 1917, he went to help organize the Speculator Mine strike in Butte, Montana, where 168 men had died. However, on August 1, Vigilantes broke into his boarding house, dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car, and then lynched him from a railroad trestle.
Author Dashiell Hammett had been working in Butte at the time as a strike breaker for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They had tried to get him to murder Little, offering him $5,000, but he refused. He later wrote about the experience in his novel, “Red Harvest.” It supposedly haunted him throughout his life that anyone would think he would do such a thing.