Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 047-2 - October 1993 Collection Type: Books and Periodicals Collection Name: Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins # of Pages: 12 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2014-03-04 19:16:02 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 04:05:59 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 04:05:59

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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At the time of the first confrontation in January between the C.I.O. and those newly hired miners they called “scabs,” ~ the County District Attorney Vernon Stoll expressed his intention to remain neutral until the National Labor Relations Board had issued a ruling on the C.I.O.s claim of illegal firings. His statement immediately led to protests from many local citizens, and he soon moved to a hostile C.LO. stance, promising the public that he would aggressively prosecute the Mine, Mill men accused of rioting. The attitude of County Judge Raglan Tuttle quickly became evident when he set bail for the accused rioters at $2,000 each, a very significant amount of money at that time. Because of that action he became the target of an extensive letter-writing campaign from friends of the C.L.O. from outside the district. On more than one occasion Tuttle publicly expressed his anger at this response. Early in June a jury in Judge Tuttle’s court returned a verdict of guilty in the accused rioter’s case after less than one hour of deliberation. The C.1.0.’s letter-writing campaign against the judge may well have backfired, because Tuttle gave the men stiff sentences which ranged from a $600 fine and six months in jail for some, and ten months in jail for those who could not afford to pay any fine. The isolation and defeat must have been very painful to the convicted men and their families. For the anti-C.1.0 forces of Nevada County, the expulsion of the members of the Mine, Mill local and their families was welcomed. Edmund Kinyon of the Grass Valley Union asam sured them that even though some pro-C.1.0. forces in San Francisco and the capitol were trying to slander the citizens of Grass Valley and Nevada City, that he had met many in the Bay Area, Sacramento, Chico, and Aubum who announced support. He said these supporters indicated to him that they would have done the same to protect themselves from the threat the C.LO. represented. Peace now prevailed, Kinyon said, now that all the outsiders were gone. In the aftermath of the April 1938 vigilante action, C.L.O. membership in Nevada County rapidly declined. Though it had recently become the legal bargaining agent for the BannerLava Cap Mine, this action was soon reversed by mine management. C.I.0. members who had been forced to leave the district during the rioting were fired or allowed back on the condition that they accept the Mine Workers Protective League as the new bargaining agent for the mine. Hope for federal assistance for a continued struggle also disappeared in July of 1938. Much of the C.I.0.’s hope had been pinned upon the help of the National Labor Relations Board which had made a favorable ruling for the Mine, Mill local in 1938 in a dispute at the Idaho-Maryland Mine. On appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, the corporation prevailed on the grounds that the N.L.R.B. had no jurisdiction in the Idaho-Maryland case. Since technically the gold produced in the mine never left the state while property of the corporation, the requisite element of interstate commerce was lacking for N.L.R.B. intervention. While a strong and united local, backed by the regional parent union, might have appealed this decision to the Supreme Court, Twin Cities Local #283 was hopelessly beaten. One of its last mimeographed publications made this sad reality vividly clear. As it said: We are the refugees from Nevada County. We are the men and women and children who have been driven from Nevada County. We have been beaten. We have been driven from our homes and from our jobs. While many of the C.I.O. miners returned later to the district rather than move on, they did so on the terms given to the Mine Workers Protective League by the mining corporations. The International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers never tried again to organize the district. Nationally recognized unionism thus remained excluded from the heart of California’s hard-rock gold mining industry because of the action of Nevada County’s vigilantes. Author’s Note This last August I was contacted by Peter van der Pas, the esteemed editor of the Nevada County Historical Society Bulletin, who made a request for my help. He had been doing research on the Murchie Strike of 1938 with the hope of writing an article for an upcoming edition of the Bulletin. He explained that his health had prevented him from completing it. Having heard from Ed Tyson at the Searls Library that I had earlier written on the topic, Peter asked for me to take over the project. I assented to his request. The article here included, represents a rewriting of an article that I wrote and was accepted for publication in 1985 by the California Historical Society (“Communists and Vigilantees in the Northern Mines,” California History, Vol. LXIV, No. 2 (Spring 1985), pp. 143-151, 164-165). For convenience sake and because of limited time, Peter and I agreed that the Bulletin article would not need to cite specific sources. For those pedants or scholars that wish to consult my sources, I invite them to refer to the original article. It is conveniently available at the Searls Library. I do believe a brief statement about sources is necessary, however. In general, I relied on two major types of sources. These are classified as secondary, and primary. The most important of the secondary sources was a Masters Thesis from Sacramento State written by local historian Lynn Bramkamp. Lynn’s thesis was based on newspaper sources, court records, and interviews with local citizens. For my primary sources, I also relied on the Grass Valley Union, the Nevada City Nugget, the Sacramento Bee, and interviews with local mine workers just as Lynn had. But I was also fortunate to uncover a “gold mine” of a source to which he did not have 19