The murderers parked in front of 316 North Wyoming Street shortly after 3am. One stayed by the car while the others – six of them, all masked – entered the boarding house. They roused the owner, a woman named Nora Byrne. “We want Frank Little,” they said. Terrified, she directed them to room 32. They kicked in the door.



Their quarry, a slender, dark-haired man, had been sleeping. They hauled him out in his underwear, giving him no time to dress or grab his crutches, and bundled him in the car. They drove a short distance, stopped, tied him to the rear bumper and dragged him over the street’s granite blocks.

Out on the Milwaukee bridge, just outside town, they beat him. Then they attached a rope to a railway trestle and strung him up. “Cause of death: strangulation by hanging,” said the coroner’s report.

Frank Little. Photograph: Wikipedia

So ended the short, eventful life of Frank Little, labour leader, strike organiser and anti-war protester, in Butte, Montana, on 1 August 1917. A crippled, one-eyed, itinerant activist, he took on a giant corporation, and the US government, and lost.

A century later the mystery remains: who killed him? The murderers were never identified. There are other puzzles. Was Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, involved? What did the number 3-7-77, pinned to Little’s body, mean?

As the US lurches towards the most toxic presidential election in living memory perhaps the most intriguing question is this: did the lynching help pave the way for Donald Trump?

That is a heavy historical load for an all but forgotten figure. In Butte there is no statue or street named in Little’s memory, not even a mention of him at the town’s World Museum of Mining, just a few miles from the scene of his kidnapping. He lies in the pauper’s section of the Mountain View cemetery.

Snapshot showing the body of Frank Little, who was lynched in the early morning hours of 1 August 1917. Photograph: Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

“In American history he’s barely a footnote,” said Arnold Stead, author of a recent book on Little. “If you’re not reading someone like Howard Zinn you’re not going to come across him at all.”

Odds are most Bernie Sanders or Occupy supporters never heard of Little. Yet a thread links his lynching to current battles over inequality, labour mobilisation and blue collar representation.

“The history of labour in America and the fight for recognition was much, much bloodier than Europe’s,” said Arnon Gutfeld, a historian who worked in Montana’s mines and investigated Little’s murder. “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”

Little grew up in the twilight of the Gilded Age. Corporate titans known as robber barons amassed fortunes on the backs of workers who toiled for meagre pay in difficult conditions. Grand mansions co-existed with homeless camps known as hobo jungles.

Violence is as American as cherry pie Arnon Gutfeld

Little, the son of a Quaker and, according to Stead, part Cherokee, is thought to have been born in Oklahoma in 1879. After a stint as a miner he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labour union known as the Wobblies. The nickname’s origin is unclear but the organisation’s goal gleamed bright: a revolution to let workers – in fields, farms and mines – keep what they produced.

The IWW’s leaders and intellectuals – socialists, anarchists and Marxists – were based in Chicago but Little criss-crossed hamlets, towns and cities in western states, agitating, recruiting and evangelising with little more than the clothes on his back, oratorical power and a fearlessness bordering on suicidal.

He preached to fruit pickers, lumberjacks, oil drillers and miners, urging them to strike for better pay and conditions and if necessary to impede – to sabotage – production.

Reverse view of Frank Little’s grave in Butte, Montana Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian

He drew crowds by standing on street corners reading the Declaration of Independence. He appealed not just to white working men but women, blacks, latinos and hobos, insisting they had common cause.

Business owners hated and feared Little. Newspapers denounced him and police jailed him. When that didn’t work, hired thugs beat him up – but that didn’t work either. Little was the “hobo agitator”, fighting for freedom of speech and catching trains to flashpoints in Washington, California, New Mexico, anywhere where he could stir things up.

The US’s entry into the first world war in April 1917 raised the stakes. Patriotic hysteria swept the country. The Espionage Act virtually criminalised any opposition as treachery. IWW leaders opposed the war but hesitated to say so publicly. Little, in contrast, by then a board member, branded it a capitalist slaughter-fest for which no worker should die. When soldiers rounded up hundreds of striking Arizona mine workers in June 1917, an enraged Little denounced the troops as scabs.

Weeks later he headed north to America’s industrial crucible: Butte. The Montana town sat atop “the richest hill on Earth”, a font of copper which drew tens of thousands of miners. It had been known as the Gibraltar of Unionism, with powerful unions and a socialist mayor. But by 1917 the aptly named Anaconda company, a global player, was crushing organised labour.

In retrospect it was a death foretold, but Little ignored warnings.

It controlled employment, newspapers, police, politicians and for good measure had a militia, said Gutfeld, the professor. “In many respects Montana at that time was a colony of the Anaconda company. If you wanted to commit suicide you went out against the company.”

A horrific accident in June 1917 killed 168 miners, infuriating survivors and giving the IWW, Little hoped, a chance to recruit. He arrived on 18 July. He was 38 and a physical wreck – thin, ill, a broken leg in a cast. Even so, he gave a barnstorming address to miners. He spoke with “maniacal fury” and “practically threatened the United States government with revolution”, the pro-company Butte Miner newspaper reported. For two weeks Little kept at it, urging miners to strike and “fight the capitalists but not the Germans”.

Newspapers demanded authorities crack down “without gloves” on such “sedition” and “treasonable tirades”. In retrospect it was a death foretold, but Little ignored warnings. Maybe he thought he would escape with just a beating. Maybe he knew what was coming. “It would be better to go down slugging,” he had told colleagues.

There were no witnesses to the abduction besides Byrne, the boarding house owner. And there were no known witnesses to the lynching. A man called Robert Brown on his way to work found the body swinging from the trestle some time after dawn. Pinned to the underwear was a placard: “Others take notice, first and last warning, 3-7-77.”

Rumours swirl to this day: that Little was castrated, stabbed 27 times and lost his kneecaps; that the numbers referred to his draft number, or Montana’s grave specifications, three feet wide, seven feet deep, 77 inches long; that he was killed by union rivals, or a patriotic mob.

The grisly details, said Jane Little Botkin, are exaggerations. He was savagely beaten and tortured but didn’t lose body parts and was likely unconscious when hanged. “I believe they put him on top of the car and drove the car out from underneath him. He didn’t struggle. He was strangled, the neck did not break. ”

The funeral procession for Frank Little. Photograph: Walter P Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

Little Botkin, more than anyone, should know. The activist’s great grandniece, she has spent seven years combing official archives and plumbing family lore for a biography, Frank Little and the IWW: the Blood That Stained an American Family, due out next year. The retired teacher believes the numbers refer to a warning to vagrants to buy a $3 train ticket for a 7am stagecoach, as ordered by a purported secret committee of 77 men in Helena, Montana.

Little Botkin and other historians agree the killers most likely worked for Anaconda. The company had armed thugs, private detectives and police officers on its payroll. Which would explain why the official murder investigation went nowhere.

There is a literary sub-plot. In his youth Dashiell Hammett, who created the fictional detective Sam Spade, worked for the Pinkerton detective agency, which specialised in strike breaking. Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, concerns a labour dispute set in a thinly veiled version of Butte.

In her memoirs Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s companion, said he told her he was offered $5,000 to murder Little. “Through the years he was to repeat that bribe offer so many times that I came to believe … that it was a kind of key to his life. He had given a man the right to think he would commit murder.”

Some have speculated the novelist actually did it. William Nolan, one of Hammett’s biographers, thinks not. “He didn’t do it but the fact that someone even asked him, thinking that he would be that kind of person, and that he was that deep into the thing made him feel guilty. He never got over and it always haunted him.” Hammett subsequently became a communist and ended up on a McCarthyite blacklist.



Little’s murder initially provoked flurries of defiance. Thousands attended the funeral and sang La Marseillaise. Protests flickered across the west.

But instead of galvanising the movement, the lynching presaged a government crackdown: federal troops in Butte, martial law in Spokane, the Federal Sedition act of 1918 and the arrest of 165 alleged IWW members, resulting in jail terms of five to 20 years. “The wounded IWW ... seemed to lose all of its old dash, all of its genius for improvising guerrilla tactics,” noted the historian Robert Tyler.

Members of Little’s family were arrested, terrifying the family into decades of silence, said Little Botkin. “If you had Frank’s photo on you that could be sedition. We had no photos of him, not one. The family just stopped talking about him.”

His death signalled the end of the only truly radical and in some ways truly effective union of the time. Arnold Stead

A movement which had mobilised the homeless and taught workers to take direct action never recovered, said Stead, the biographer. “His death signalled the end of the only truly radical and in some ways truly effective union of the time.”

Stead sees a continuum through the evolution – and weakening – of US unions. Instead of a wide movement infusing white, black and Latino workers with a shared class identity, unions narrowed and moderated their goals, seeking gains only for dues-paying members.

Arguably this was a sensible, successful tack which benefited members. But globalisation and anti-union laws gradually drained their power. Only one in 10 American workers now belong to a union despite stagnant wages and widening inequality.

Which brings us to Trump.

In the absence of powerful unions, or a shared identity with the working poor of other races, blue collar white men are Trump’s strongest supporters. “They feel angry and left out so it’s no surprise now that you have people willing to support someone who doesn’t give a damn about them,” said Stead.

For CW Copeland, a Montana member of the IWW, which still limps on, the fault lies not just with unions but also the Democratic party and progressive academics. They neglected labour issues, he said. “A lot of those going crazy for Donald Trump identify more with their whiteness than with their class. If more people knew about Frank Little … I think you’d have fewer voting for Trump.”

Perhaps. But Little’s grave sits amid yellowing grass and weeds in a lonely corner of the Mountain View cemetery, drawing few pilgrims

“Slain by capitalist interests for organizing and inspiring his fellow men,” says the headstone. Cemetery signposts direct visitors to another grave, one adorned with flags and offerings. There rests Evel Knievel, the type of hero America remembers.

• This article was amended on 10 October 2016 to attribute information about Little’s heredity to his biographer, Arnold Stead. A Butte reader pointed out that Butte does remember Little with an annual graveside commemoration, a sculpture and at the Labor History Center.

