Educational Media Reviews Online

Just about halfway through An Injury to One, writer/director/narrator Travis Wilkerson declares, in the self-righteous ominous tone of voice he’s adopted for the whole of his film, “It is 1917…. The murder of the agitator proves to be the flaming torch. It now seems clear. The journey towards McCarthyism passes through Anaconda Road.” The agitator is Frank Little, an IWW organizer who came to Butte, Montana, in mid-July of that year to support a strike against Anaconda Mines for higher wages and safer working conditions - a recent underground fire had killed 160 miners. The company pretty much ran the town - it owned the newspapers, the judges, and the police force. Little’s message addressed not only immediate concerns, he also promoted the Wobbly cause - world worker revolution, abolition of wages, the elimination of the capitalist class – and Anaconda, in its press, painted him a seditious traitor. After all, it was wartime, the U.S. had recently entered the war in Europe, copper was critical to the war effort, and Little was saying he’d rather fight the capitalists than the Germans. Just two weeks later, on August 1, thugs, almost certainly hired by Anaconda, mutilated and murdered Little and hung a sign on his hanged body, “First and Last Warning! All Others Take Notice! 3-7-77” (the last the legendary dimensions of a Montana grave). (Indeed corporate America would still be employing homicidal tactics against union organizers up until World War II and beyond.) And then, in what can only oxymoronically be referred to as a non-sequitur segue, Wilkerson mentions that the name of a radical striker arrested and jailed shortly after Little’s murder was Joseph McCarthy - which leads him to the peroration quoted above about the McCarthy hysteria some thirty years in the future! By this time, though, we’ve already become inured to, and exasperated by, Wilkerson’s polemically simplistic storytelling. Little’s tragedy and the history surrounding it, including the mineral exploitation of the land, the cruel exploitation of laborers, etc. - all very much a part of the American story - are here recounted with attitude, in an off-putting good guy/bad guy manner. At this point in the film we also learn that the famous Dashiell Hammett, who was in Butte at the time of Little’s murder working for the company as a Pinkerton undercover detective, was, according to his lover Lillian Hellman, offered $5,000 to commit the crime (to this day officially unsolved). The offer was the “flame,” Wilkerson claims, which convinced Hammett that only violent revolution could root out capitalist corruption – a view Wilkerson sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, seems to agree with. Hammett, of course, was a direct victim of McCarthyism - this a much more plausible link to the future than the one Wilkerson earlier touted. The Hammett novel more or less based on the events in Butte is Red Harvest (1929), and in the novel the town is prophetically called Poisonville. Prophetically, since environmental pollution is also brought into the story. Apparently when the mines were no longer profitable to operate, Anaconda left Butte an environmental disaster. Claims on the box that the film is brilliantly experimental are, in Mark’s Twains immortal phrase about the premature reports of his death, greatly exaggerated. We’re treated, among other things, to four miner songs, not one of them actually sung, but with imposing mid-titles, one or two words at a time projected in a frozen screen - all in tedious slow rhythm. We’re also treated, for dramatic effect supposedly, to lots, lots of repetition. But the film, a cynic might say and as the credits tell us at the end, is only a Cal Arts masters’ thesis - what did you expect? It’s sad nonetheless that Wilkerson didn’t trust this important story in American labor history enough to allow it to tell itself - where were the thesis advisors? Rather it’s filtered through an overlay of what can only be called naively idealistic propaganda. Idealistic, to be sure, but propaganda, to be sure, as well. A much more balanced, informed, and engaging film about the IWW is Deborah Shaffer's and Stuart Bird's 1979 documentary, “The Wobblies.” An Injury to One is recommended with reservations.