Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Great Michigan Read Author Mary Doria Russell, right, answers a question about her novel "The Women of the Copper Country" from area resident Betty Perkis at a "meet the author" event at Cold Iron Brewing on Thursday. Ironwood Carnegie Library Director Lynne Wiercinski stands in the center.
By ZACHARY MARANO
Ironwood - The author of the 2021-2022 Great Michigan Read "The Women of the Copper Country," Mary Doria Russell, was invited to Cold Iron Brewing by the Ironwood Carnegie Library for a "meet the author" session on Thursday.
Russell said that the idea for her historical fiction novel "came literally out of left field" as she was sitting in her living room waiting for a baseball game to start one afternoon. She then stumbled upon a PBS documentary about the Copper Country strike of 1913-1914 while flipping through the channels.
"So, to pass the time before the first inning, I decided to watch this documentary about copper mining. And there she was - Anna Clemenc, literally standing head and shoulders above the crowd, leading striking miners on daily parades through the streets of Calumet," Russell said.
Standing at 6 feet 3 inches tall, "Big Annie" Clemenc was a well-known local figure from Calumet. She participated in the 1913-1914 strike as a miner's wife and union member. Russell said that Clemenc was the inspiration for the protagonist of "The Women of the Copper Country," Annie Clements. Russell said that she changed some other details for the sake of the story, but largely based the novel on actual events.
Russell said that she was drawn in by the documentary, casting Clemenc as the heroine of the story and the owner of the mine, James MacNaughton, president of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, as her nemesis. Russell said that in addition to being on opposite sides of the miner's strike, MacNaughton contrasted to the uneducated, gender nonconforming, Slovenian descendant Clemenc in several ways.
"MacNaughton (was) a time and motion efficiency expert who had made Calumet and Hecla Mining Company the most profitable and powerful copper mining company in the world. James MacNaughton ran Calumet and Hecla as a benevolent dictatorship. He was a WASP - a white Anglo-Saxon protestant - who was proud to carry what Kipling called 'the white man's burden,' which was to rule and civilize lesser races," Russell said.
After watching the documentary, Russell shared online that she might be interested in writing a story about the miner's strike. One of her friends, Rivkah Tobin, responded to her post saying that her great-grandfather, Solomon Kivisto, was the last man to die in the copper mines before the strike began in 1913. Russell said that Tobin helped her research the novel.
Russell said that not much is known for certain about Clemenc's motivations for participating in the strike because she never found the time to commit her thoughts to writing, but she speculates that when she learned about Kivisto's death, "something snapped in her."
"In 1913, an average of one miner a week was killed - week after week, year after year. That's killed, not merely crippled and discarded like a piece of equipment that couldn't be repaired. I think the women of the Copper Country were tired of waiting to find out who would be widowed this week and destitute the next," Russell said.
Russell said that fundamentally, her novel is about who creates wealth and who gets to keep it - questions that we are still grappling with today, she said. Russell also said that other present-day concerns manifested during the 1913-1914 strike.
For example, Russell said that MacNaughton, like other members of the upper class in his time, was concerned about immigrants undermining American values and that he did not trust the Calumet and Hecla workforce because it consisted primarily of immigrant men. She also attributed a quote to MacNaughton saying that grass would grow in the streets of Calumet before he recognized his workers' union.
Russell also said that automation replacing jobs was a contributing factor to the strike. To compete with the open pit copper mines of Arizona, MacNaughton introduced a one-man drill to replace the two-man drill. This eliminated a large percentage of Calumet and Hecla's underground workforce, Russell said, and any worker who agreed to use it was taking away work from a neighbor, friend or relative in the community. She also said that miners considered the one-man drills far more dangerous.
Russell said that she lives in Lyndhurst, Ohio, and visited the Upper Peninsula three times while researching the book. She said that she does not plan on writing another novel and will retire after completing the Great Michigan Read program. After her discussion, Russell stayed to sign copies of her book.
