It was in this modest, two-story brick building that Butte’s union leaders, and Frank Little, hashed out strike strategy. The building was known as the Finlander Hall (or Finnish Hall). The original address was 318 North Wyoming, but the building was demolished in 1941, leaving only this parking lot. For 40 years before that, however, it served Butte’s Finnish community, as well as some of Butte’s radical labor and socialist organizations.

The Finlander Hall’s uses changed over time. Butte’s Finns built the hall in 1901. Initially, the purpose was primarily religious and social. It was their church and a place to host weddings, holiday events, and other celebrations. When the hall was built, Butte’s Finnish population was small. But after 1910, it grew rapidly. Finns were soon one of the largest ethnicities in the city, with an enclave (Finn Town) centered a few blocks southeast of here.

While Butte’s Irish were deeply divided between conservative and radical unionists, Finns were exceptionally open to left-wing politics. The Hall hosted union meetings early on, and by the early 1910s it was regularly hosting Socialist Party events. After 1914, Finlander Hall became associated with Butte’s growing IWW membership. When a left-wing union movement emerged in 1917, the Finlander was a natural fit for a meeting hall.

Butte’s new miners’ union was officially called the Metal Mine Workers’ Union (MMWU). Some MMWU members were also IWW members, but most were not, and the new union turned down overtures to become a local of the IWW. Still, the strike leaders greeted Frank Little as an ally and included him in their meetings at the Finlander Hall.

By the time Little had joined them, the MMWU faced a tremendous uphill battle. Long strikes were grueling for workers and their families. And workers faced intense pressure from those who argued the strike was undermining America’s war efforts. These pressures, as well as the promise of better contracts, were already beginning to lure some skilled tradesmen back to the job in July of 1917.

Little argued, in closed door Finlander meetings, for a more aggressive approach. He suggested picketing mine entrances and packing protesters along the Anaconda Road (the main road that went up to the mines on the northeast side of the parking lot). But Butte’s strike leadership rejected that idea. They feared pickets and protests would be used as a pretext for violence by the Anaconda Company. And if chaos erupted, public opinion could turn against the union.

Violence, however, was already in the air. Private agents hired by the Company roamed the city. Some had even infiltrated the union and sat in on meetings at the Finlander. There were rumors that the police chief, Company gunmen, and government officials were hatching some kind of plan at the Finlen Hotel (a block and a half south). Frank Little, meanwhile, had already received direct death threats.

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Along with the “Richest Hill on Earth,” Butte also garnered the label of the “Gibraltar of Unionism.” Butte was indeed a fortress of solidarity. But as it turned out, that fortress could be blown up, just as much as the hard granite encasing Butte’s rich copper deposits.

In the late 1800s, Butte was a preeminent pro-labor town. The Butte Miners Union (BMU) was one of the largest local unions in the United States. The union’s first meeting hall, built here in 1881, collapsed. But by 1885, the union had raised funds to construct another building. This new, two-story, brick building stood strong for decades, right alongside the BMU.

The BMU’s strength, coupled with warring Copper Kings, gave miners a strong hand in late-nineteenth century Butte. Mine owners didn’t question the BMU’s legitimacy, and the union secured high wages for its miners.

Miners elsewhere in the West were not so lucky, and they turned to the BMU for help. In 1893, after a series of violent strikes in the Idaho silver mines, miners across the West met in Butte at the Miners Union Hall to create the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), an organization that could coordinate strike support across the West. The BMU became Local #1 of the WFM.

In the early 1900s, striking miners faced intense violence from state authorities and mining companies’ hired guns. This violence prompted some WFM organizers to create an even broader federation of workers in 1905: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Unlike other labor federations, the IWW sought to organize all workers, regardless of occupation, skill level, race, gender, or nationality. Moreover, the ultimate goal of the IWW was the abolition of capitalism. It was a radical vision that attracted committed, but idealistic, activists like Frank Little, who at the time was a WFM organizer working in Arizona.

Meanwhile in Butte, the Anaconda Company had consolidated mine ownership, thereby undermining the BMU’s power. Some miners found hope in the emerging radicalism of the IWW. But the BMU’s leadership was more conservative. In 1912, the Company instituted the “rustling card” system that allowed the Company to blacklist radical mine workers. BMU’s leadership capitulated. Internal strife grew in the union, reaching a breaking point two years later.

On June 13, 1914, radical and dissatisfied BMU members attacked union leaders during the Miners Union Day parade. A riot of competing union factions broke out. Ten days later, an angry crowd gathered outside the Miners Union Hall where the BMU leadership was meeting. Anger led to violence. Two men were shot and killed. Later that night a dynamite blast ripped through the hall, reducing the walls to rubble.

After more clashes and bombings in the summer, the governor declared martial law and sent in the National Guard. With the BMU and its meeting hall in ruins, the Anaconda Company announced it would no longer recognize a miners’ union. The once mighty BMU had fallen.

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Hands and forearms clasped in solidarity symbolize a movement of local and national significance during the first decades of the twentieth century. One of the few socialist meeting halls remaining in the United States, the building is a monument to a turbulent era of labor unrest and political action. Socialists in Montana played an active role in forcing mainstream politicians to consider labor reforms. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company dominated Montana politics, much of the economy, and nearly everything in Butte, personifying all the negative aspects of the capitalist system. Butte, known as the “Gibraltar of Unionism” with its huge working class, was thus central to the socialist movement. Members constructed this hall in 1916. It was the heart of socialist activity in Montana, housing the Socialist Party of Montana, the Butte Local, and the Butte Socialist Publishing Company. World War I hysteria prompted Montana to enact the nation’s most stringent measures to suppress radicalism and dissent. The Socialist Party suffered severely. In 1920, it deeded the building to the Bulletin Publishing Company, whose Butte Bulletin, edited by electrician and radical unionist W. F. Dunne, carried on the party’s principles by supporting the Non-Partisan League. Dunne lost the building to taxes in 1924 and the Bulletin ceased publication. Socialist Hall, with its rallying inscription “Workers of the World Unite,” is a poignant reminder of the efforts to create a “cooperative commonwealth” and the solidarity engendered by the Socialist Party of Montana.

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